Teaching

I have assisted in developing the learning materials of five courses. See the list of the courses, my overall reflections, and what I still need to improve below.

Virtual reality

Course: IS_LT 7361 Introduction to Digital Media

Instructor: Dr. Xinhao Xu

Task(s) and artifact(s):

• to design and develop learning activities for students to explore the opportunities for learning and teaching with VR.
• link to the Student Teaching as a Research (STAR) grant proposal which describes learning activities I designed and developed in this course.

What I learned:

• to work in collaboration with other team members to design and develop learning activities for module 6 of the course;
• to design and develop learning objectives of these modules;
• to design and develop learning objectives;
• to design and develop content and activities for pages of modules 6 regarding Introduction to the module, what Virtual Reality (VR) is in comparison with Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality, how VR can be used in education, discuss and create activities;
• to design and develop pre and post surveys to measure students' self-perception of their role as co-designer of their learning process.

Big data ethics

Course: DATA SCI 8860 Data and Information Ethics

Instructor: Dr. Rose Marra

Task(s) and artifact(s):

• assisted in designing and developing a case analysis PowerPoint as a learning material.
• link to the Powerpoint which describes data reuse and ethics of using public data.

What I learned:

• to create a Powerpoint, making use of hyperlinks to faciliate online learners' navigation throughout the content and activities of the document;
• to select important and relevant information from relevent reading articicles and synthesized them to create the content for the PowerPoint

Usability

Course: IS_LT 9421 Usability of Information Systems and Services

Instructor: Dr. Sandra Erdelez

Task(s) and artifact(s):

• assisted in designing and developing contents regarding remote usability testing for week 13 of the course.
• link to the PDF document which describes remote usability testing, abilities, types, and pros and cons.

What I learned:

• to design and develop learning content on PowerPoint;
• to have a better understanding about remote usability testing, softwares for remote usability, abilities of remote usability, types, and pros and cons of remote usability;
• to create discussion questions which require learners to read all the previous content and understand it to answer the questions.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

Course: IS_LT 9410 GIS for Decision Making

Instructor: Dr. Denise Adkins,

Task(s) and artifact(s):

• compiled materials on how to create a story map using ArcGIS
• links to a tutorial on How to create a storymap cascade here, on How to create a journal story map here, and winning maps as examples here.

What I learned:

• to selecte videos suitable in terms of length, content presentation and information organization for online learners;

Information behavior

Course: IS_LT 9411 Doctoral Seminar on Information Behavior

Instructor: Dr. Sandra Erdelez

Task(s) and artifact(s):

• designed and developed a PowerPoint on concepts relevant to Information Behavior
• link to the Powerpoint which includes concepts relevant to Information Behavior, questions for discussions, and activity for consolidation

What I learned:

• to select important and relevant information from relevent reading articicles and the textbook and synthesized them to create the content for the PowerPoint;
• to design discussion questions which promotes meaningful and deep learning for students;
• to design consolidation activities which promote higher order thinking skills on the Bloom's taxomony.

My overall reflections

The designing and developing of the learning materials and activities for the aforementioned courses has provided me invaluable opportunities to apply the knowledge and skills obtained from the courses I have taken related to instructional design for online learning like IS_LT 9485 Designing for Online Learning by Dr. Marra, IS_LT 9411 Doctoral Seminar on Human Computer Interactions by Dr. Moore. For example, I applied the three-part objective principles combining with Bloom's taxonomy learned from Dr. Marra's class to create learning objectives for Module 6 of Course IS_LT 7361. I also applied ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning proposed by Mayer and Moreno (2003) and principles of multimedia learning recommended by Mayer (2001) introduced in Dr. Moore's class in the design, development, and selection of learning content for all the courses. The feedback from the instructors of the courses have helped me to refine my skills in instructional design for online learning.

The experience in assisting in developing the materials for the courses has also helped strengthen my knowledge in the areas of my research interests like GIS, instructional design, UX design and usability, Virtual Reality in education, and data science. During the process of working on these courses, I also have learned the importance of communications to have an end product of quality and meet the instructor's expectations. For example, though provided a template for a case analysis and resources to do a similar case analysis for DATA SCI 8860, I initially struggled to work on the case provided. I talked with Dr. Marra about my concerns and she gave me further guide and provided close check-ups afterwards. I started that case analysis without any prior knowledge on how to do a case analysis, especially in data ethics and ended with knowledge in data ethics and confidence in creating cases.

I also learned about the importance of collaboration and promoting individual leadership. For example, while working on Dr. Xu's course, I worked with other two team members. We designed and developed activitities for this course based on discussions and assigning tasks based on research interests and indivual competence. For example, I am intersted in pedagogical usability, so I took the responsibility to make sure that learning objectives, activities, and interactions promote meaningful and deep learning.

In summary, the design and development of learning materials for the courses have cultivated my knowledge and skills in instructional design and how to design lessons of quality when working independently and in collaboration with others.

What I still need to improve

Though I have assisted in the design and development of learning materials for certain numbers of courses, I have not had any experience in working as an instructor or a teaching assistant. I also lack experience in the design and development for the whole course, grading, and interacting with students.

To fulfil my teaching experience for my Ph.D. studies, I need to work on a teaching position. I plan to discuss with my advisor - Dr. Marra for potential teaching opportunities.