Category Archives: Instructional Design

Publishing with Amazon: My reflections

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I recently ran a test of all publishing services for one of my classes as we are publishing a book together. After evaluating all options, we decided to publish with Amazon. So before I published that book with my class I wanted to see what the tool was really like, so I published another book. Here is my experience:

I formatted my book into PDF format and then I signed into createspace. Overall, it was very easy to use. I created a book title, entered author information, and then had to choose payment information. I then selected if my book would be color or black and white and what size it would be. At first I chose 6×9 but realized that I created my book in word and it was 8.5×11 so I had to choose 8.5×11. Otherwise there were no formatting issues. Then I created a cover. Amazon has a great cover creator template that was very easy to use. It does not allow much customization and I think it can be improved tremendously however it was good enough. I have a feeling they will not improve it as they want you to purchase the design services they offer. Once my book was created I had to choose a price. The cheapest my book could be sold for was $2.65. That means that I can sell for 2.65 or higher. At $2.65 I collect no royalty. I chose $4.99. This means that for every copy sold I get $0.84 from Amazon. Not too great but honestly my book is on amazon.com and they are doing all of the work. I am still waiting for the book to be listed on Amazon, they say it take 5-7 business days and today is day 1:) I will post the book to the blog once it is posted to Amazon. Also, you can order copies for yourself as author for $2.15 a copy and provide discount codes to family/friends.

Here is what my book looks like in the createspace store. It should be uploaded to Amazon in the next 5-7 business days: https://www.createspace.com/3864560

Now onto Kindle publishing. Well this was a bit more complicated and I will need to continue this post when it works because right now my book is in limbo with Kindle. Publishing was just as easy as Amazon’s createspace. The only difference was that I needed to reformat my text. Kindle recognized certain symbols but not others. For instance, a lot of my text, such as the beginning and end of each chapter was smashed together. Thus I had to use page breaks. It took me about and hour to reformat, so be prepared for that. Then I submitted my text for review. My book is currently in limbo because I have two websites that offer sections of the book for free on the sites. So Amazon is currently making sure I actually own those sites because they did an online content check. I am glad they are checking for copyright and people scamming the system however this is taking longer and I am now waiting two days for a response. I am hoping this issue is cleared up asap. I also hope that I do not have to take the content down from the sites before publishing with Kindle.

 

Self Regulated Learning: Self Explanations

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Self Regulated Learning: Self-Explanations

When presented with MERs, learners do not automatically retain information, they must actively organize and process it in order to be able to use it for later use (Kozma, 1994). Therefore, learners should have good metacognitive skills in order to be able to effectively learn from multimedia. Chi et al. (1989) suggest that good students solve problems well due to the way they studied the instruction or examples presented to them. This is inline with Perels, Gurtler, and Schmitz (2005) who found that teaching learners self-regulation strategies improves their problem solving ability and Schoenfeld and Herrmann (1982) who found that novices problem solving abilities can be improved to almost that of experts. Based on these conclusions, there is clearly a difference in the way that learners of different prior knowledge levels use representations. Learners with high prior knowledge, experts, can solve problems and form concepts because they have a better understanding of the material and therefore know how to make the appropriate connections. Low level learners do not have that understanding and therefore its important to figure out how these metacognitive strategies are used by both experts and novices to construct information. The current study intends to focus on one of these such strategies, self-explanations, which has been shown to help learners construct, understand, and retain information.

Current studies have shown that using self-explanations (Bereiter & Bird, 1985; Ainsworth & Burcham, 2007; Renkl, 1997) and multiple external representations (Carney & Levin, 2002) can help novice learners retain information. The use of self-explanations as a learning strategy has been shown to increase comprehension by creating a deeper understanding of the content (chi et al., 1994). Self-explanations, which are often times referred to as think alouds, are self-generated explanations that learners speak or think aloud while they are learning new material (Chi & VanLehn, 1991; Pressley et al., 1992). Research on self-explanations has shown that when used in a multimedia environment with MERs, learning and comprehension are increased. For example, Ainsworth and Loizou (2003) sought to discover the role self-explanations had on comprehension by presenting participants with either diagrams or text and having them think aloud as they were reviewing it. It was discovered that participants in the diagram treatments scored significantly better on tests measuring inference, created more self explanations, and spent less time studying the content. Participants who generated the most self-explanations were found to score significantly higher suggesting that the more students think aloud, the greater their comprehension. Similar results were uncovered by Aleven and Koedinger (2002) who sought to discover if self-explanations would lead to greater comprehension and problem solving ability. 41 high school students were placed into either an explanation (solve problems with think alouds) or problem solving (solve problems with no think alouds) treatment and were given a computer based instructional tutor. Students scored significantly higher on problem solving and comprehension measures in the self-explanation treatment. As a result of these studies, there is a clear advantage to using think alouds in learning and a benefit to using them in multimedia instruction. Roy & Chi (2005) have concluded that this happens “Because there is more information to explain in multimedia materials compared to single media (i.e., there are within and between media relationships to be discovered), a constructive activity such as self-explaining might be especially suited to learning from resources such as text and illustrations.” (p. 277).

eBook: How to self publish

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As part of one of my courses this semester, I had my students divide into groups to write book chapters for a book on how to teach online. The book will then be published online for free. So in this effort, I have been analyzing different methods to publish online and thought I would put my findings here for others to use:

Apple’s iBooks Author – http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/

-Free to use
– Slow publishing times – account and such need to be approved by Apple. Apple can reject your book.
– If you charge for your text, Apple owns the rights (they take 30% of profit). If you offer for free, you can still publish elsewhere because there is not ISBN. But the good thing is that you can distribute for free!
– iBooks only work on Apple devices so those with PC, Kindles, or other eReaders are out of luck.

Amazon Self Publishing: Createspace

– Free
– You own copyright
– Cannot distribute for free. Must charge at least 2.15 per book. If in Kindle, must charge based on file size. Minimum charge is $0.99.
– Amazon provides free ISBN through createspace

SourceFabric – http://www.sourcefabric.org

– Free to publish and host – you host on your own server
– Can distribute anywhere

 

TED-ED Videos and Lessons

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Now on the TED website (http://ed.ted.com/) you can not only post videos, but you can create quizzes, add materials, and even keep track of your users. Seems pretty cool and is a great way to promote open education. Check out the video that walks you through the new site:

Design before Technology

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I just saw a discussion on LinkedIn about this topic and ran into the issue during my student comprehensive exams. I will also write about it at some point but for now I have created a quick video. The main idea: You need to first look at your analysis, objectives, and instructional strategies before you choose your technology. Otherwise you might be setting yourself up for failure if the technology cannot deliver and meet your goals. Too often people ask me if they should be using Flash or Captivate or Articulate and I say: What are your objectives? What are your strategies? What does your analysis say? Is that really the best tool? Do NOT choose technology first:)

Lesson Learned: Peer Reviewing

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Since my previous post reminded me of one of my PSU professors, Frank Dwyer, I figured I would make another post about a good lesson he taught me – How to peer review.

In his class, Dr. Dwyer gave each student a research article, that had been published in a well respected peer reviewed journal. My task: To also peer review the article. I took several days and read the article, wrote up my review, and turned it in. To my surprise, the following week everyone in the class got our reviews back with many red comments. The problem?

The research article we were given was terrible. Everything from the lit review, methods, results, and conclusion had major problems. It apparently, according to Dr. Dwyer, was published due to politics and wasnt peer reviewed properly but still made it into the journal – whether thats true or not I do not really know but that is the story I was told:) Anyway, all of our reviews basically told the same story: that the paper was great and should be accepted. Dr. Dwyer went through and showed us everything that was incorrect. I could not believe i didnt see all of it but I thought hey, this is peer reviewed, these journals and reviewers know more than I do, they are experts. Well lesson learned. Never accept anything that I read or see without careful analysis and evaluation. Overall it was a great lesson and has made me a good peer reviewer for my colleagues and my own work – at least I think so:)

Bad Instructional Design: Dale’s Cone of Experience

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Prepping for my class today I ran across the following image which is a modified version of: Dale’s Cone of Experience. Obviously there is no research to back this image up and I consider it fake. This just goes to show what goes on in our field as I found it on an instructional design website. And in fact, if you look up Dale’s cone on google you will find many education and instructional design sites with this fake image and they claim it is real.

Again, this image is not real (no research backing it up it is just made up):

Here is the site that is using this as part of their article – sorry I am not trying to offend you, its just this image is not real and you are using it)

So you can only remember 5% from lecture? Where did you get these stats from? 10% from reading? 20% from audio-visual? Look at my 2 studies on comprehension, learners scored around 50% using audio-visual on facts, concepts, rule/procedures and problem solving knowledge. And this was technical content that they had no prior knowledge in. If they had prior knowledge I would expect it to be significantly higher.

Also, here is a good site that breaks down just how wrong this image is: http://www.brainfriendlytrainer.com/theory/dale%E2%80%99s-cone-of-learning-figures-debunked

And for those who are interested, here is the original image that was published and then turned into the above one. And again, none of them (these two or others that look similar) have any research backing them up.