Software Engineering Design Principles Applied to Instructional Design: What can we Learn from our Sister Discipline?

The failure of many instructional design initiatives is often attributed to poor instructional design. Current instructional design models do not provide much insight into design processes for creating e-learning instructional solutions. Given the similarities between the fields of instructional design and software engineering, instructional designers could employ the ideas and techniques employed in software engineering to improve their design solutions. Software engineering development and project management methodologies can be employed to develop effective e-learning solutions. Furthermore, software engineering design principles used to develop high-quality software can be applied to planning and enhancing instruction. Fundamental software design concepts, such as abstraction, modularity, reusability, compatibility, extensibility, scalability, and maintainability are all important factors that can potentially lead to the development of high quality instructional solutions. This paper explores the possibility to integrate software engineering design principles into instructional design for e-learning solutions, which not only augment the generic instructional design approach with the best practices from the field of software engineering, but also make the development process more productive and efficient. Finally, this paper illustrates how all of the software engineering design principles are interrelated and can be realized in practice to enhance the quality of instruction.     

The role of lexical knowledge and related linguistic components in typical and poor language comprehenders of Chinese

The present study adapted the “Blueprint of the Reader” in comprehending language by Perfetti [2000, C. M. Brown & P. Hagoort. (Eds.), The neurocognition of language (pp. 167–208). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press] as a framework for understanding Chinese language and reading comprehension in a group of 361 secondary Forms 1, 3 and 4 Cantonese-speaking Chinese students (mean age of 15 years) in Hong Kong. This framework with some modifications was tested with nine specially designed Chinese language and reading tasks with reasonably high reliability and surface validity. The main hypothesis was that lexical knowledge consisting of derivational morphology; correction of characters, words and sentences; segmentation of text into phrases and sentences; and writing to dictation should explain considerable individual variations, as shown in the English literature. This was tested with component analyses and multiple regression analyses. The total battery accounted for 66.80% of the variation while lexical knowledge alone explained 33.51% of the individual variation in the overall school performance in Chinese reading and writing. The second hypothesis was that subgroups of poor and good language and reading comprehenders in Chinese would be expected to show overlapping yet different component structures and their performance in the individual component tasks would be expected to differ as tested with analyses of variance. The results confirmed this hypothesis. Task analyses of the written protocols of essay writing and of morphological processing (prefixing and suffixing) provided insight into well-formed and poorly formed writing and word formation according to principles of Chinese psycholinguistics and yielded information for theory-based practice.     

Training Orthographic and Sentence Structures Helps Poor Readers in Chinese

We trained 36 12-year-old Chinese students with reading disorders in the analysis, synthesis and integration of orthographic constituents of semantic and phonetic bujians (radicals); and also their writing (spelling and composing) skills. These target students were compared with 37 age-controls in a pre-test and post-test design on a number of reading literacy indicators predicated on the “Blueprint of the Reader”. The tasks were: essay writing; morphological compounding; correction of errors; segmentation; text comprehension; fluency; copying of words, and of texts; writing to dictation; and reading aloud words and text. A promax oblique structure analysis of the performance of the 73 students found the tasks clustered into four components. A two (group) × 11 (tasks) multivariate analysis of covariance with the pre-training tasks as covariates followed by analyses of variance showed that the experimental students outperformed their age-peers in essay writing, morphological compounding, correction of errors, text comprehension and reading text aloud. They were also highly satisfied with their training as shown in a questionnaire survey.     

高校教师教学培训的效果研究： 概念变化的视角

本研究从“概念变化”的视角，探讨高校教师教学培训项目的效果评估以及培训存在的问题。研究对象是“FD-QM高等教育混合在线课程质量标准”教师培训项目，一项有关课程设计的全国性高校教师培训项目。通过定量分析学员提交的300份课程评审作业，考察他们对标准背后的“一致性建构”课程设计原理是否准确理解。研究发现，教师在课程评审中出现了不稳定、前后矛盾的结果，表现出有悖于“一致性建构”原理的、失衡的评审图式，这从深层次说明教师在转向“以学生为中心”的教学观，实现“概念变化”上存在困难。研究还探讨了从促进教师“概念变化”的高度创新教师教学培训模式的必要性，并揭示了本土情境下丰富“概念变化”理论的未来课题，以更有效地引导教师教学发展的实践。     

基于顾客体验的新服务开发与设计

基于体验的服务能够使顾客感受到积极的、独特的和持久的心理满足,新服务设计包括了顾客体验、顾客之间的互动、可视化互动界面、前台员工活动、服务场景、服务作业过程、后台员工活动、IT系统支持过程和内部交互界面等九个要素,在此基础上提出新服务设计过程模型,通过体验识别、体验设计、体验测试和体验交付等环节实现顾客体验和服务创新战略的融合.