Introduction
Teachers aim at satisfying the academic needs of students irrespective of their physical conditions. In this light, they design a teaching methodology that considers the need of all students. This paper will, therefore, touch on creating an instructional design that provides instructions in a technological manner.
Importance of Designing for Complete Support
Understandably, students have diverse capabilities and weaknesses that call for a detailed description which caters for all their needs (Felder & Brent, 2005). An instructional design plays an imperative role in satisfying these needs. For example, modern education has created a general curriculum that combines the disabled students and non-disabled ones.
This implies that the teacher must create a design which satisfies the need of the non-disabled students as well as the disabled ones. In this case, the teacher should include audio instructions in the teaching materials to ensure that blind students are not inconvenienced
Redesigning a MATLT Activity
In light of redesigning a MATLT activity, this paper will revise a PowerPoint presentation to suit all students including the visually and audibly handicapped. This presentation, which was designed to discuss writing skills, is referred to as Effective Writing Skills.
Thorough evaluation shows that the presentation was purely textual because it has not represented any information diagrammatically. However, diagrammatic representation of information is crucial since it is easy to understand, follow and internalize. Consequently, the principle of multimedia is applied in order to include diagrammatic illustrations in this presentation.
The diagrams and photos ensure that the presentation is more understandable than the textual one (Mayer & Clark, 2011). Furthermore, it reduces the overall load by summarizing information that was represented in words. Lastly, the principle of multimedia allows for inclusion of links that redirect the learner to relevant article and books which address the topic.
Additionally, the presentation includes irrelevant information which creates confusion during lessons. Irrelevant information distorts the coherence of this presentation by deviating from critical issues that are related to effective writing.
In this case, principle of coherence allows the removal of irrelevant information and encourages inclusion of main points that are related to effective writing. As a result, it eliminates confusion and embraces brevity to ensure that students can understand the presentation in an easy way.
Lastly, this presentation calls for the application of redundancy principle. According to this principle, the designers should aim at including verbal and visual features as well as reducing wordy information. In addition, this editing ensures that the photos and corresponding audio files appear simultaneously. This ensures that audio file describes the corresponding diagram that is displayed on the screen (Hall & Strangman, 2003).
Design Rationale
This design has applied three principles which include applying multimedia, attaining coherence and removing redundancy. Applying multimedia is the key principle that has been used in the process of redesigning this presentation.
It aims at redesigning the presentation to cater for students who are visually and audibly handicapped. Second, principle of coherence is applied to ensure that the presentation focuses on the key issues that are relevant to effective writing. Lastly, redundancy principle coordinates visual and audio features ensuring that the presentation is not wordy.
Conclusion
Based on this paper, it is evident that instructional design is a crucial requirement which enables instructors to develop materials that satisfy the needs of all students. Secondly, it is noticeable that teachers can redesign previous technological work to suit students according to the prevalent needs.
Additionally, the process of redesigning the work is based on predefined principles which involve applying multimedia, attaining coherence, and eliminating redundancy among others. When the three principles are applied, the presentation suits all scholars regardless of their physical challenges.
However, the process of incorporating photos and video links is quite challenging due to scarcity of photos which are related to this topic. This problem is eliminated by creating personalized and including them in the new presentation.
References
Felder, R., & Brent, R. (2005). Understanding student differences. Journal of Engineering Education, 1(94), 57-72.
Hall, T., & Strangman, N. (2003). Differentiated Instruction and Implications for UDL Implementation. National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum, 4.
Mayer, E., & Clark, R. (2011). E-Learning and the science of instruction. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.