Week 2 Reading Reflection

The issue of instruction in various mediums is one that's of great interest to me. For almost 10 years, I've been involved in the standardized test prep industry in different roles. I've taught and tutored in person and created curricula, and in the past couple of years I've also been involved with an online test prep start-up that has been experimenting with different modes of teaching. It's this last endeavor that I thought of as I reviewed this week's readings.

The online start-up began by providing students access to an interactive "game" in which they solved mock questions from their chosen exam either alone or in a group. There is a chat function that allows for discussion as the students proceed through the questions, and "badges" for achievement provide motivation. The company soon branched out into online seminars taught live by teachers, using the same chat function, and eventually incorporated Skype into tutoring sessions as well. Now they've progressed to offering live classes taught by an on-camera instructor. Although the online games are still offered, they are no longer the focal point of the company, and I think that's a shame.

The online format allowed for a kind of hands-on learning that's often absent in test prep, but because students were unfamiliar with it, feedback on the company's offerings (consistent with the Evaluate step from ADDIE) led to the gradual move toward the more conventional aesthetic of a teacher in front of a whiteboard; the only difference between this model and normal classroom-based test prep is that the internet aspect allows the classes to reach a much greater number of students. While students in the early days of the company's launch often requested FAQs or tutorials on how to use the site, administrators chose to forgo any kind of instruction along those lines, citing the constant evolution of the games' aesthetic and functionality as a barrier to providing up-to-date tools for learning how to navigate the games and the site as a whole. They maintained that the constant revision required for FAQs or tutorials would be too great of a burden. As a result, interest in the games plateaued and in order to remain competitive, the company had to shift its focus from collaborative, self-paced games to instruction-based learning.

I think that this kind of scenario is the perfect application for screencasts and online tutorials, and is also really illustrative of the possible consequences of not incorporating those technologies. The use of internet learning tools can provide a huge boon to budget-constrained libraries, but patrons won't take advantage of those tools if they're not made intellectually accessible to them. Even if the subject of a tutorial is frequently updated, requiring that the tutorial itself be monitored and updated in response, this is still more cost-effective than conventional live instruction. As future librarians, we need to consider not only the programs and tools we offer to our users, but also the ways in which we can make those programs and tools easily comprehensible and maximize their value.