Evaluating Online Disaster Preparedness Training for Family Caregivers of Senior Citizens

Master's project for the Learning Design & Technology DepartmentAccording to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), more than half of the casualties from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were senior citizens, and many died from avoidable injuries. As climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, communities must plan for an increasing senior population with many now opting to live with their adult children. Seniors are more vulnerable to hazards due to economic, medical, social, cognitive, and physical issues. Precautions taken in advance of disasters can greatly reduce senior citizen casualties. Having an understanding of disaster preparedness is key to building resilience and mitigating impacts. Family members who take on caregiving responsibilities may not have access to or time for formal training in disaster preparedness. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an online module, created with Articulate and Canvas, to train participants on the special preparedness needs of elderly family members. Participants completed the module, including pre- and post-surveys and an assessment. The project used Baldwin and Ford’s transfer of training theory (Baldwin, Ford, & Blume, 2009). Participants can use the knowledge gained from the module to enhance their ability to support senior citizens. The presentation will show parts of the module and discuss the findings from the evaluation

Expansive Framing as Pragmatic Theory for Online and Hybrid Instructional Design

This article explores the complex question of how instruction should be framed (i.e., contextualized). Reports from the US National Research Council reveal a broad consensus among experts that most instruction should be framed with problems, examples, cases, and illustrations. Such framing is assumed to help learners connect new knowledge to broader “real world” knowledge, motivate continued engagement, and ensure that learners can transfer their new knowledge to subsequent contexts. However, different theories of learning lead to different assumptions about when such frames should be introduced and how such frames should be created. This article shows how contemporary situative theories of learning argue that frames should be (a) introduced before instructional content, (b) generated by learners themselves, (c) used to make connections with people, places, topics, and times beyond the boundaries of the course, and (d) used to position learners as authors who hold themselves and their peers accountable for their participation in disciplinary discourse. This expansive approach to framing promises to support engagement with disciplinary content that is productive (i.e., increasingly sophisticated, raising new questions, recognizing confusion, making new connections, etc.) and generative (i.e., supporting transferable learning that is likely to be useful and used in a wide range of subsequent educational, professional, achievement, and personal contexts). A framework called Participatory Learning and Assessment (PLA) is presented that embeds expansively framed engagement within multiple levels of increasing formal assessments. This paper first summarizes PLA as theory-laden design principles. It then presents PLA as fourteen more prescriptive steps that some may find easier to implement and to learn as they go. Examples are presented from several courses from an extended program of design-based research using this approach in online and hybrid secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and technical courses.Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost of Information Technolog

Recognizing competencies vs. completion vs. participation: Ideal roles for web-enabled digital badges

Open digital badges are new credentials that can contain specific claims and links to web-enabled evidence, and can then circulate in networks. Badges are helping facilitate broader shifts away from measuring, accrediting, and credentialing achievement and towards capturing, validating, and recognizing learning. A study of 30 funded efforts to develop badges found that none of the efforts to develop competency badges (for demonstrating specific competencies) resulted in thriving badge-based ecosystems, while four of the five efforts to develop participation badges (for engaged participation in social learning) resulted in thriving ecosystems. The findings were relatively mixed for the remaining efforts to develop completion badges (for individuals completing projects or investigations) and hybrid badges (for multiple types of learning). These findings suggest that innovators temper their ambition for capturing and recognizing evidence of individual competencies, and consider exploring more social assessments and informal and crowdsourced recognition.The MacArthur Foundatio

Stay or spray? Evaluating larval delivery strategies in a multi-partner coral reef restoration project across Gunggandji and Yirrganydji Sea Country

Coral reef ecosystems are declining globally, accelerating development and uptake of coral reef restoration methodologies. Supplying coral larvae directly to natural substrata can re-establish corals on degraded coral reefs and is one of the reef restoration methods being applied through the Reef Co-operative, a new collaboration between Traditional Owners, scientists, tourism operators and a conservation group. Working together, we captured coral spawn at Moore Reef on Gunggandji Sea Country, raised the larvae until competent, then transferred 6 million to recruitment-limited Hastings Reef on Yirrganydji Sea Country for settlement. We investigated the effect of different larval delivery methods on settlement, including under two sizes of larval containment net and spraying larvae directly onto the reef with no containment. Settlement was highest when larvae were delivered under the smallest nets placed over the least irregular natural substratum. The manageable size of these nets was a positive attribute for our diverse team with varying prior experience in field work like this, but they were also the most resource intensive to produce and deploy. Our results illustrate the trade-offs between high larval settlement rates, cost-effectiveness and manageability of larval delivery methods, particularly for multi-partner projects with social as well as environmental objectives