Cynthia Dismang Educational Module Review

Cynthia Dismang

SC EC Educational Module

Investigating Earthquakes through Regional Seismicity

http://www.data.scec.org/Module/module.html

The concept for the SCEC educational module was designed to teach the effects of the different forces on the Earth’s crust that can be observed and measured.  Each section focused on a particular concept with several sub-concepts within each lesson.  Section one focused on the forces that break the Earth’s crust causing an earthquakes.  Section two how earthquakes come in clusters and section three focused on how earthquakes can be recorded and analyzed.    I thought this was an interesting concept.  Participants of the module would learn several concepts about earthquakes and it focused on California’s seismic activity.  It provided an interesting scenario to introduce the topic to lead into a pre-test.  It also had several animations and images to connect concepts.

As I said before I thought the idea of this module was interesting but I found several things I thought could have been improved to make this a better and possibly more effective learning module for students.  First, the home page had some relevant images but had a lot of blank space and was not very visually appealing.  The navigational bar did not have links to the homepage, table contents, about the module, or from the links to SCEC.  The comment forum link did not work in the navigational bar either.  I could not find any objectives for the course, but rather an overall concept for the module with concepts for the three sections and sub-concepts.  The concepts described the information that was presented in each section, but there were not objectives to give any direction as to what was expected of the students or to measure achievement.  The information for each page was very lengthy and somewhat overwhelming.  It did provide several images and animations to help students to understand the concepts, but the layout still was not very appealing.  There were several links that did not work.  More instructions would have made navigating through the site easier.  There were a few instructions but they were later in the site and would have been useful earlier and the site and directions on how to navigate would have been helpful.  It would have been better to give instructions like press the arrow to advance or push the back button on the browser to come back to the site after viewing an image.   Also, when you do push the back button it would have been nice if it would go back to the activity rather than the outer section and you have to click the activity again to get back to where you were.  I did not find any date for the site but the authors were John Marquis, Katrin Hafner, and Egill Hauksson.   

The site did a great job providing images and animation to make the concepts easier to understand.  It also added interest to the topic.  The use of bold words helped to distinguish the important terms from the rest of the information.  The opening activity you had to pretend you were trying to save people after an earthquake.  You had to borrow a helicopter but to get fuel you had to answer questions about earthquakes correctly.  If you answered right you saved people, but if you answered wrong then you did not.  I only saved six people and lost 14.  At the end of the quiz different medals were presented for learner encouragement depending on the outcome of the quiz.  It also provided feedback in activity 12 of section one with a score and a comment of needs more review to perfect.  My favorite and most interesting link was to the Recent Earthquakes in California and Nevada.  It was in activity 5 in section 2, it showed where on a map there had been an earthquake and you could see the time, date, and size.  There had even been an earthquake on the day I viewed the site.  In the storyline link on the navigational bar you could find the module concept and there was also an option of a graphic image of the concept.  I found the graphic interesting because it looked like a roll of paper used to read seismic activity with smaller rolls underneath and each roll described the section concept and the sub-concept.    There were several learning activities in each of the three sections.  The activities used the previous knowledge and let students practice the information they just read about.

What to Evaluate                                                                                        H       M       L	Score
Instructional Aspects:
1. Objectives clearly stated 1 2. Objectives appropriately sequenced 1 3. Instructional strategies appropriate for the objectives 1 4. Instructional activities/process clearly described 1 5. Tasks adequate/significant for achieving objectives 1 6. Resources adequate/significant for achieving objectives 1 7. Learning achievement adequately evaluated 1 8. Evaluation criteria clearly expressed 1 Motivational Aspects: 9. Gaining and maintaining learners’ attention 3 10. Relating to learners’ interest and goals 1 11. Building on learners’ prior knowledge & foreshadowing what the lesson is about. 2 12. Providing positive feedback and feeling of accomplishment 2 13. Motivational strategies serve for objectives 1 Web Design Aspects: 14. Navigation clear and easy to access 3 15. Authorship and date clearly stated 1 16. Text follows rules of grammar, spelling and literary composition 2
Total	23

In conclusion, I did not rate the overall module very high only a 23 because I felt there were several areas that could have been improved.  I did however like the module and I do feel it could be a very interesting study for a unit lesson.  It would not be a module I would want to do in a short time frame but there were several learning areas it could be used in and practiced a little each day. 

I enjoyed the images and animation and thought the tools used in the site were relevant and had their place.  A few more instructions for the images and videos may have provided a better understanding of the activities.