In our on-going effort to improve our Web Design learning experience we’ve been trying to listen very carefully to the feedback from our learners and update our program in response.
Back in June this year we started restructuring the learning pathway through the course into smaller yet holistic levels with individual deadlines/milestones. This was in response to feedback that, although participants enjoyed the freedom of learning with real projects and at a pace that suited their own needs, the resulting
- lack of milestones to work towards and
- the difficulty for the learner to gauge how far through the course they are themselves
were sources of frustration for learners!Now, after having run with the levels of webdesign for the past six months and listening to on-going feedback from our participants, I think it’s safe to say the following: (if you have other thoughts, please add a comment with your thoughts!)
- Organising individual learning levels/learning agreements and setting corresponding short-term milestones with learners has been very helpful for many (not all) participants - giving short-term deadlines to work towards and breaking up the learning into manageable yet relevant chunks.
- The individual learning levels have generally not helped to gauge how far through the course a learner is in terms of assessment (even if they have done so in terms of learning).
- It requires substantial time to set up and manage 15-or-so individual learning levels with learners (but in my view, worthwhile).
- It can be difficult for multiple facilitators to work with an individual to plan the learning levels. (Initially we were using electronic Learning Agreements - Word docs in a shared folder that learners could view but not edit - but this had a number of problems. We now create a new TODO list in our BaseCamp project whenever a student starts a new level. This means that potentially all the facilitators and the student can provide input, students can assign tasks to facilitators and negotiate their milestones.)
Now we’re also beginning to think about the possibility of offering the Diploma in Web Development second semester next year, so it’s a good time to take stock of student feedback and try to improve the learning experience once more! After talking with our students over the past while, there are two current issues that I can identify (but again, if I’ve missed something or you have other thoughts, please add a comment!):
- “What do I need to do to finish?” - As mentioned above, it’s difficult for learners to gauge their progress towards completing the course within a self-paced, project-based learning environment. Although the Learning Levels are helping students to gauge their learning progress, they don’t necessarily help gauge their assessment towards the qualification (the difference between learning skills and demonstrating competence in a certain unit). We do keep a folder for each student where we collect evidence for each unit and identify the units that they have already demonstrated, but it is a “teacher’s folder”.
- “Do I need to learn this?” or “Have we actually learned that?” - It is difficult for learners to gauge whether what they are learning is relevant/required for their qualification, or whether they are in-fact learning everything they require for the qualification - learners just have to trust me as the facilitator. As much as I’d love learners to jump at every opportunity to learn, they also have time constraints and need to focus their attention on what needs to get done to gain the qualification.
Demonstrating Webdesign: A possible solution
Up until this point, we’ve been using Evidence Sheets to help learners gather evidence for each unit of competency, but it’s always been under the control of the facilitator. I would sit down with the student and find evidence from the sites that they’ve been working on or the activities/challenges that they’ve completed, document it on the evidence sheet for that unit of competency before storing it in the folder.
My main reason for doing this was to protect the students from the Units of Competency, which, in the IT training package are often incredibly difficult to decipher and generally confuse learners.
Enter the new Demonstrating WebDesign site: (Edit: Moved to Wikiversity)
The purpose of DemonstratingWebDesign is to help you gather evidence to demonstrate your skills in Web Design as they relate to the following Australian qualifications:
- ICA40305: Certificate IV in Information Technology (Websites)
- ICA50605: Diploma in Information Technology (Website Development)
These resources are not designed to help you learn web design-related skills - although they may help you focus your learning. The resources that you find here at DemonstratingWebdesign are designed to help you demonstrate that you have learned the required skills, by gathering and documenting evidence of your skills in practise.
The idea is to build up a resource that will help students understand how each unit will benefit them, provide ideas for how they can demonstrate their competence, provide a link to the official unit of competence, and provide an evidence sheet for each unit that they can use to document their evidence against the criteria (with help where needed of course!)
I’m hoping that this, together with the current Web Design resources and processes will help learners gauge their progress through the course (in terms of knowing exactly how many units they’ve left to demonstrate and what they can do to demonstrate each unit), and provide a way for learners to keep me accountable in terms of what I “teach” (for want of a better word).
If you have a spare 5 minutes, please read the introduction on the Demonstrating Webdesign hope page and the example resource developed for the Australian Certificate IV in Websites. Especially if you are a student! I’d love to get feedback/comments as to whether you think this resource might help some of the issues that you’ve identified.
Edit (15/11/06): After discussion with others, I’ve moved the DemonstratingWebdesign resource to include it as part of the already established WebDesign@Wikiversity resources. Initially I thought that it would be good to use Wikispaces as the target audience is only Australian people learning web design, but then why not generalise the concept to include qualifications from other countries - and open up the channels for feedback and improvement?
Forgot to mention, one of the aims would be to provide new students with a booklet containing a cover sheet with all the units, evidence sheets for each unit, with the wiki descriptions/ideas for demonstrating on the back of each unit page…
I think the section you’ve documented on ways to demonstrate evidence is a major winner in helping the student understand what is expected of them in being assessed. Even the coding genius can feel confused with what the ‘official’ TAFE sheets are requesting. Having the lighter examples and outcomes relieve major confusion pressure that most experience during the course.
The one other thing that I feel is critical is that Multimedia be integrated properly with the programming and communications. It is completely disjointed. We need blocks of learning a particular application, say 5 weeks straight on Photoshop, then 3 wks using Flash etc. Perhaps one of the earlier programming assessments could integrate a photoshop task. working with a basic imaging and learning to manipulate effects with it and also resizing and file optimisation.
Each week has felt like it’s been thrown to the wind! If you’ve never used graphics software like that before (which applied to myself), switching from one application to another, week from week, becomes totally confusing as you have no time to familiarise yourself with menus properly and searching for other functions within the menus.
The results from the four hour blocks have been minimal and many dazzling results I have viewed were self-generated by the user experimenting at home.
Sound multimedia skills are critical with web design!
Okay … leaving my soapbox now
P.S. have you listened to the CD yet? Well stop reading and start listening!!! and R E L A X :-)
Brigitte
paper queen of 2006
When the power goes out, everyone will come running to me for technical references! You see it’s not about a hording disorder after all!
Hi Mike,
Great to watch you continually develop this course.
I agree with brigitte. Sound multi media skills are essential - perhaps prerequisite to your course. The absence of multimedia always struck me as odd, but not personally knowing much about code myself I kinda suspected that multimedia was not the domain of your course (old web developer/designer paradigms left in me). Now brigitte has worded up, I think its true - sound multi media is essential to web design.
But not proprietary based. Similar to your approach with code, learning from basic text editor up, I would argue learning from simple and free, through open source and then specialist commercial products.
Also - why wikispaces? I have just started using wikiversity a whole lot more… are you leaving wikiversity?
Hope the Hints for demo’ing your competence will be as helpful as you said Brigitte… wonder what some of the others think?
Hey Leigh! The current course does have a multimedia component (although the new one starting next year is very light-on), but as Brigitte pointed out, it’s not currently integrated with the technical/programming stuff… (the MM class happens in a separate room, with separate challenges) so it can seem like an island off on it’s own.
Partly my responsibility - I think I use the excuse that “I’m not a designer - I’m colour-blind” to just focus on my own area rather than trying to integrate the stuff that other facilitators are focusing on…
Great idea about the software Leigh - get people started on Gimp (that they can use free at home etc), and then introduce the commercial packages!
PS: We’re still using the Web Design@Wikiversity to update all our learning activities etc (Brigitte helps me out occasionally with it too!) It’s been great getting more and more help and contributions from people around the world (slowly!).
I’d started the DemonstratingWebdesign on Wikispaces mainly because it’s (1) got a smaller audience (Australian qual), and (2) it’s much easier to use (main problem I’m finding with Wikimedia stuff is that it’s very scary for lots of people). If it’s still hard to get others involved I might move it over… what do you think?
Oh, and BTW Brigitte, I have been listening to the CD… and relaxing (a bit) :) Taa!
I reckon you should keep going in wikiversity. I now prefer the wikimedia format. Yes it is funky, and I hope they’ll improve, but the ability to edit a page in sections is a real plus to me. Especially when dealing with a big page.
I’ve started there with Networked Learning and Facilitating Online (sorry - no link, I’m rushing, but a search will find them)
I’m slowly getting each department where I work in there as well - with a view that if we ever get our own wiki in our org, it will likely be a media wiki - so the transfer will be smooth.
I’d like to record an interview about your work in wikiversity some day soon Mike. I’ll keep an eye out for you and buzz you to see if you have time.
Hi there Michael-
First of all, a big sincere thanks to you for putting in so many hours of thought, work and effort in the course. It’s really been great, I’ve learnt way more than I expected and it will be
kinda sad to leave.
I love the fact that this course is flexible and unstructured and based loosely on what is relevant ro what you’re doing. I know my opinon differs greatly to some in the course, but I’ve never really done that well in ‘traditional’ educational institutions, like high school and uni.
There does however always come the question ‘what do I still need to do?’ so I think the new Demonstrating Web Design site will be fantastic.
While it’s important to cater for what suits the typical learner, from someone in my shoes, pleease don’t cancel out the opportunity for people to learn at their own pace when required. It’s really important to me.
Regarding the multimedia component, when I signed up it did seem to be more of a prerequisite. I’m lucky in that I’ve done a lot of graphic design stuff with photoshop in High School and Uni, and if it wasn’t for that I would have left the course quite in the dark. This also means I’m quite stuck in my ways, so it would be great to find out some fresh ideas, and new (or easier!) ways of doing things. I finished the multimedia component this time last year, so a lot seems like a distant memory. I feel confident with what I already know, but it still would have been great to learn some more, I’m even considering coming back next year to do some flash in the evenings.
While it would be great to do more multimedia work, I think a lot of precious time would be lost where it is needed elsewhere. It is web design after all, not graphic design. We did quite a lot of flash with Leigh last year, and it would have been great to continue with that and keep up the practice (even 4 hours a week would have been great) throughout this year.
Some defined (on paper) structure and planned revision throughout the year for multimedia would have been the cherry on the cake!
Sorry it took me so long to post, but I promised and knew I’d get there eventually!!
PS to brigitte- what are we going to type on if the power is out! ;)
Ah Penny, our star - proof (hope) that what we’re talking and doing is somehow good and useful.
Talking of bad habits, I think my Flash stuff is full of bad habits. Using Flash for one. I started getting hopeful when Edward toyed with SVG and Blender, open source animation DTsoftware… hopeful that I might escape the proprietary lock I was in and finnally start learning some alternatives.
But perhaps my proprietary know how was a prerequisite for that? Perhaps knowing and experiencing software lockin is needed before doing the hard yards to freedom.
And then, long before that, there is a good understanding of image, sound and video formats and what they can do, how to use basic free software to get those formats, not to mention the print archive formats like PDf and DJaVu…
I don’t think this is the exclusive domain of graphic design. I think it is essential know how for web designers.