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What’s so nice about ABC Studying Design?
ABC Studying Design was developed by Clive Younger and Nataša Perović at College Faculty London in 2014. It’s constructed on 100 years of educating and studying analysis distilled right into a conversational framework of six studying sorts. ABC is intuitive, quick, hands-on and collaborative.
This design methodology is repeatedly evaluated and the newest research – ABC to VLE Challenge, 2018-20 – surveyed 344 contributors from 11 international locations, who marked these statements as “to an important/very nice extent”:
- 26 per cent stated ABC had an influence on implementing their establishment’s schooling technique
- 44 per cent felt extra assured of their educating after partaking with ABC
- 53 per cent stated ABC had an influence on the design/redesign of a course
- 74 per cent discovered that ABC facilitated discussions about course design.
ABC has now been utilized by educators in additional than 80 universities the world over. It may be used for any supply mode, stage of research and course size. This text focuses on how the web course manufacturing staff is utilizing this methodology to design brief on-line programs.
How one can put together for an ABC workshop
You will want:
- one small, various staff of material specialists (two to 4 folks is right)
- one interactive storyboard (Microsoft Planner and Trello work nicely)
- one facilitator
- three to 5 studying outcomes
- 90 minutes in your diary.
Make your studying outcomes clear and actionable so learners know precisely what they’ll be doing and the way they’ll be doing it. Use energetic verbs, and contemplate what stage of problem is acceptable on your course, as set out in Bloom’s taxonomy.
To create an ABC storyboard utilizing a collaborative planning platform corresponding to Microsoft Planner or Trello:
- Create a brand new plan or board and add your staff members to it.
- Rename the left-hand column “Studying sorts (copy from right here)”.
- Add six new duties/playing cards with the placeholder “[Activity title]”.
- Obtain the six ABC studying sort playing cards and add every one to the six duties/playing cards.
- Click on on one job/card to disclose additional choices and create the next labels: “Studying”, “Video”, “Audio”, “Current media”, “1 min”, “5 minutes”, “10 minutes”, “20 minutes”. You’ll use these throughout the course design course of to set exercise timings and label your acquisitions.
- Add a brand new column for every week, matter or part of your course and rename it nevertheless is most helpful: for instance, “Week 1 – Introduction to course design”.
Now you’re all set on your workshop. Consider the left-hand column as piles of bodily playing cards. To position a card in your storyboard, copy it from the “pile” within the left-hand column, give it a brand new title and applicable labels, and add any helpful notes and sources that may enable you keep in mind your concepts and develop your content material. For instance:
- Studying sort: Acquisition
- Title: What’s local weather change?
- Labels: “5 minutes” “Video”
- Notes: Animation explaining key info about local weather change.
You’ll be able to share this ABC studying sorts and exercise examples fast information with the staff earlier than the workshop or use it to introduce the session, to supply definitions and assist the artistic juices circulate. You may also prefer to share our content material writing cheat sheet to get an thought of exercise phrase counts and learner effort time, which you’ll maintain for later reference.
Operating the ABC workshop
The workshop runs absolutely on-line – we use Microsoft Groups. Begin with a five-minute icebreaker wherein the staff writes a tweet-sized description of the course. This helps to get everybody fascinated about the core message and goal of the course in easy, shared phrases.
Spend the remainder of the session creating your storyboard. The purpose is to construct studying sequences made up of quite a lot of studying sorts: bite-size chunks of data and brief actions. We’ve got discovered the workshop runs most easily when one or two folks take cost of the board whereas discussions are happening. The playing cards might be dragged, dropped and edited as a lot as you need!
This can be a snapshot of the storyboard we created for our course How one can create a brief on-line course:
Bear in mind, learners are competing with heaps of distractions within the on-line surroundings. Quick, targeted actions of five-, 10- or 15-minute chunks usually tend to maintain them energetic and motivated.
How does your design look? Have you ever used quite a lot of studying sorts? Does your design fulfil your studying outcomes? A “rainbow” storyboard signifies that your learners will have the ability to construct and reinforce new expertise and data steadily, and extra enjoyably, by energetic studying corresponding to reflection, downside fixing and creativity.
What subsequent?
By the tip of the workshop, you should have a plan on your course construction, actions, media, assessments (if relevant) and learner effort time. This can allow you to set expectations precisely when the course is promoted.
Should you don’t full your design in 90 minutes, you are able to do a shorter follow-up session or ask members of the staff to complete off specific sections individually.
We suggest you give your staff one to 2 weeks after the workshop to overview, make modifications, add/edit notes and log off the entire design. Then you definitely’re prepared to maneuver into the content-development part.
Why not obtain our bespoke pack of ABC content material writing templates? Duplicate as wanted in line with your signed-off storyboard. Every template contains key steerage on writing type, phrase depend and helpful sources to help you alongside the way in which.
Lizzy Garner-Foy is an tutorial designer on the College of Edinburgh.
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