Facilitating Learning & Transfer
This course was one of my more “practical” courses, less involved with theory, and more about integrating what I was learning with my practice as a technical writer and content developer. There was a strong focus in our discussion forums on Learning Styles, which led me to do some significant transformational work about my own learning styles. The results of this work appears in the Portfolio Project
Concept Maps
One assignment was to develop a concept map about learning transfer, and some of the pedagogical supports. I had never seen a concept map prior to this, much less developed one 
. A highly challenging assignment for me as I am very verbal (word-based), and don’t learn well from certain types of images.
Facilitating a Group Discussion
In our online discussion forum, we were given a group project to facilitate a weekly discussion. We were assigned groups, given preparation time, and allowed to choose our topic. I suggested a topic that questioned whether paper/pencil or online learning style questionnaires were very accurate. I suggested that we devise a tool for our classmates to categories the activities and the environment that they used for learning. We developed a video that explained how we wished our classmates to complete the assignment. I wrote the script for this video.
Portfolio Project
Part of the Portfolio Project assignment was to create content for a lesson that supported learning styles. I created content using Adobe Captivate that followed a three-step ”show/try/do” process, and involved using audio and Close Captioning (Note: Captivate cannot be configured to enable CC automatically. Users must click the CC button in the Player bar.) The first step demonstrates the procedure to the learner, followed by two replays. The first replay coaches the learner as they try to follow what they saw in the demonstration. If they click in the wrong place, a pop-up displays the correct step. The second replay does not provide any coaching, only positive feedback when the appropriate step is taken.
Lesson Snippets:
