See earlier entries for explanations of what on earth this is.
I submitted my D2 a few weeks ago but haven’t had a moment to blog about it since. It took me about 16 days of working 3-4 hours a day to get from D1 to D2. That’s slightly less than I anticipated (10 full days) which is interesting to me to note because I felt as if it was taking me much longer than usual. Some of my feeling was down to frustration that I could only work 3-4 hours a day on it, for health reasons, when I prefer to work full days and get completely immersed. But it may be that it never takes me as long as it feels as if it does – empirical data for the win!
One of the tasks I always do at D2 stage is think very carefully about student workload. We pay a lot of attention to student workload because the temptation is always to add more and more interesting content but actually less is often better for students, and too high workload is a major reason for students dropping out. Here are some great summaries of why workload matters to students and more detail on how we go about mapping workload from my colleagues in Learning Design. As always, I ended up using a very high tech approach:
(For the avoidance of doubt, that was sarcasm. There are online tools to allow you to do this much more neatly, and I am quite a geeky person for a non-geek, but I just never seem to use them. I always end up with a scrawled-on piece of paper).
The numbers in squares are the four main sections of the Learning Guide (LG), and then the columns of figures are the estimate of how long it will take students to do each of the Activities I have designed. Crossings out show me cutting Activities or changing my estimate of how long it would take. There are norms for how long it takes students to read 1k words of different types of text, and it’s usual to allow for watching any AV through twice before doing something with it, but other Activities are more difficult to estimate study time and it’s definitely an art not a science. Critical Readers and Editors can be really helpful in checking your estimates. In addition to the time it takes students to do the Activities, you need to allow time for them to read your own teaching text, such as explanatory paragraphs and the instructions for Activities. There’s usually a total word limit for the LG because reading lots of text on screen is not good for most learners, and because most people learn better by doing things (Activities) than just by reading. For this module it is 10k, and my draft, at the time I was doing this calculation, was 9k (since then I’ve added a bit and it’s up to 9.5k. I’m hoping to chop some words later as I think it’s a bit reading-heavy at the moment). We estimate that 9k words will take students 3-4 hours to read, so by adding together 8h 20 and 3-4 hours, we get a total guided study time of about 11h 20 – 12h 20 for this week, which is about right for this module (students are also expected to do independent study in addition to this guided study time).
As a result of calculating workload, I realised that I did indeed have far too much content, as my spider sense had told me back at D1, even though the numbers looked okay at that point. I think this was because at D1 I had overestimated how much time students would be spending on Activities, and underestimated the time they would need to spend reading explanatory text from me. I’m not surprised that I erred this way (I am all about the Activities), but slightly chagrined to have made such a rookie error! I had to cut out some of the topics I was hoping to cover, including LGBTQ parenting, which I am quite sad about but fairly confident is the right decision given the overall learning outcomes of the LG. One of the remaining consequences of this initial error, though, is that my final section is much longer than the others (that’s what ‘bottom heavy’ refers to on the photograph). I think everything in this section is good, there’s a lovely progression between the parts, and it doesn’t really split well into two parts, so I can’t see how to reduce it, although I have flagged it to critical readers as an issue I would welcome suggestions to improve. Ultimately I think it’s probably okay if it remains a bit unbalanced, as students are given an overview of the likely study time for each section at the beginning of each week, so will know that this section is longer than the others at the beginning of the week.
One piece of AV turned out not to be suitable – the tone was too inflammatory and the angle on the issue was misleading. I decided to cut it out – luckily it’s relatively easy to cut something that has not been specially commissioned, especially before Handover. That saved me 20 minutes of Activity time. After discussion with the module chair, one of the study skills Activities I wrote was different from what we had initially planned, because it was tied to the next assessment, and this had changed. The other main difference between my D1 and my D2 is that everything is now written though properly in full sentences. One paragraph took me a whole 4 hours to write but it was an important paragraph, about a challenging topic, so it was a good investment of time.
At the moment, my D2 is with Critical Readers but in a few days it will come back to me and I will start writing the D3 version. I’m not actually sure on this module whether that is the same as the Handover version, or whether the module chair will review it and ask for further changes. I think that’s more likely and is certainly what I would advocate as good practice in most circumstances – the buck ultimately stops with the module chair and so it’s important that they have a chance to check that Critical Readers comments have actually been actioned.
Remembering My Hat 