Incorporating Bloom's Revised Taxonomy into a Syllabus

Many higher education institutions recommend that instructors use Bloom's Revised Taxonomy when creating a syllabus. Here are a few examples: Chicago State University, Duquense University, University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina - Greensboro and University of West Florida.

Incorporating Bloom's Revised into a syllabus is very easy with the open source syllabus authoring tool Salsa. Action verbs grouped by Bloom's Revised are built into the product:

Instructors can select a level of Bloom's:

And when they click on the verb, it is added to the text editor:

What are your thoughts on Bloom's Revised in the syllabus?

Merrill's First Principles of Instruction

If you're not familiar with David Merrill's First Principles of Instruction, I suggest that you check out this classic post from Dr. Joel Gardner. In this post you will find links to two great research articles on applying the First Principles of Instruction.

Joel has been involved with teaching and learning for over a decade, and is currently Program Chair of the Instructional Design and Performance Technology Program at Franklin University. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Gardner at the Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching (FACT) for a few years, and he co-authored the original article on the OAR model with Tae Jeon and myself.

Beta version of the PDF Content Blueprinting Tool

Today the beta version of the PDF Content Blueprinting Tool was finished. Academic Partnerships has developed the tool as part of its Faculty eCommons, a social learning community for faculty that will be available soon.

The official release of the tool will take place at an upcoming Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) conference.

How to develop a Canvas Course in 7 Steps

I've posted a video to YouTube demonstrating a development sequence that uses a design blueprint to create a course in Canvas--the learning management system from Instructure: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVnFpa6fUDQ.


The design blueprint was created with the PDF Course Schedule Builder.

New Article on First Principles of Instruction

My friend--Dr. Joel Gardner--recently started a Wikipedia article on M. David Merrill's First Principles of Instruction. Joel has conducted an extensive amount of research into First Principles, and published the result in his dissertation and this journal article.

PDF Assignment Builder surpasses 4000 views

I was on YouTube today and saw that the "how-to" video on the first version of the PDF Assignment Builder now has more than 4000 views. When I posted the latest version, the original only had about 2500, but I guess people are still watching it :)

Presentation on the OAR model at Utah State University

On Thursday I presented to the Instructional Technology Student Association (ITSA) from the Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences (ITLS) department at Utah State University. I was speaking to graduate students and gave them an overview of the Objectives-Resources-Activities (OAR) model, explored the FACT Instructor Guidebook for online course development and answered their questions about Instructional Design.

Here's the video.

Course Activity Maps

I've posted a new video to YouTube that shows a Course Activity Map featuring the new Acquisition Activity and Application Activity icons from the OAR model. This CAM also incorporates Activity Layers and Activity Increments.

FACT Instructor Guidebook 3

The FACT Instructor Guidebook uses the OAR model as a framework for online course development. It guides them through the process of identifying their basic pedagogy, creating a Course Statement, and exploring some acquisition and application activities.

Here's a "how to" video.

The latest version of the FACT Instructor Guidebook is available at the Faculty Resources page.

 

Online Syllabus Template Tool (OSTT) Licensed from Utah State University

I have entered into a licensing agreement with USU to develop the Online Syllabus Template Tool.

I have also developed a version 3, which can be downloaded from Google Docs.