MOATSModule Organizer and Teaching SuggestorCONTEXTWhile much attention has been paid in the last few years to developing knowledge databases for storage, retrieval, and sharing of content, there has been less effort focused on developing support systems for utilizing those content objects in theoretically varied contexts. Each knowledge content repository tends to include a lesson planner tool for organizing the material, but typically different instructional strategies based on contextually appropriate learning theories or instructional design models for the user to utilize are ignored. Multiple reasons exist for this. EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) community of practice focused on teaching and learning in higher education identified the need for an instructional support tool or database of instructional strategies utilizing technologies as the single greatest need for not only faculty in all areas of higher education, but for personnel tasked with supporting them. The need extends not only to the use of content repositories, but to the appropriate use of learning technologies. The need is for a tool grounded in excellent schemas to facilitate transformative teaching and learning practices that are organized in such a fashion as to permit multiple entry points for faculty, faculty-development specialists, instructional technology staff, and learning designers who want to inform their teaching and learning design practice with the science of learning. The challenge is beyond how to structure such a tool or database or to accurately and easily permit access by multiple users with a wide range of needs. The challenge lies in the very nature of instructional design theory, which is divided into descriptive theories (how learning takes place) and iterative practical theories (how to teach using these theories and modify them based). However, because even though the "practical" instructional design theories may offer fairly detailed suggestions on implementation of the methodology, the implementation is always a recursive process. How, then, is this process able to be introduced and captured in a technology? How is this able to be merged with other technologies? And, if the technology is able to be created to mime the iterative process using multiple content repositories, how is it able to adjust to both the user's individual needs and select from among the multitude of theories which don't agree on word usage for some of the same instructional strategies? MOATS (Module Organizer and Teaching Suggestor) is a collaborative instrument and research project that attempts to address the above challenges. The University of Arizona has given resources in time, people, hardware, software, and development to see this project take shape while the NLII has supported the research and community of practice to explore the ideas. GOALSTo create an instrument with which an instructor, or instructional support person, can enter an instructional problem or goal and an array of solutions or processes to attain it will be returned. The array should be displayed along a continuum based on the inputs concerning the instructor’s goals, preferences, and/or key instructional variables such as learner characteristics, subject matter content and learning task characteristics, or other contextual variables such as course level, class size, and teaching philosophy. The instructor or instructional support person should be able to view and select a solution along the array if the primary solution is not the most desirable. The selection based on the input pattern of variables should be stored so that popular selections are immediately available.New learning theories, instructional design theories, instructional strategies, and activities should be easily entered into the system by any user. THE APPROACHWhereas for instructional designers and educational theorists, the importance of approaching learning from within the parameters set out by the theory that is under investigation or use is a given, the same is not so with practitioners. Or rather, while higher education faculty would remain within whatever theory in their discipline that they investigate, their time is always limited and their efforts in instruction, even in the best of circumstances, do not permit extraneous study for the best set of instructional theories to meet their needs. Consequently, most instructors have not been exposed to the minimum of instructional design and when they have been, the limited exposure becomes rigid and unhelpful. The emphasis on “learning outcomes” that almost always accompanies such instruction is less than useful and quickly forgotten in the pursuit of “teaching the content.” As a result of this continuing cycle, the approach we’ve taken in MOATS is to invite the instructor and instructional support personnel to begin with learner role, instructor role, and/or problem statement.
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