Assignment#2 – Feedback

Peer Review for Group J

Thank you to Group J for creating this course! Savings is a specialized study and we can tell from this interactive learning resource that we are becoming more interested in savings. Based on the grading rubric, we analyzed its strengths and areas for improvement from different perspectives. We hope you will gain valuable input from the feedback below to support your learning resource.

1. Content Feedback

• The assessments could show feedback using an explanation as to why an answer is correct/incorrect after a learner selects an option. This helps reinforce concepts, and also doesn’t leave the learner guessing if they get the answer incorrect.
• When going through the assessment, we found some errors when passing questions 1 and 3 in assessment 2. After selecting an answer and getting marked incorrect, clicking show solution revealed no correct answer for either of the questions.

• Correct us if we are wrong, but we found duplicate content in the “learning design plan” section. You have included “Big Ideas,” “Essential Questions,” “Learning Outcomes,” “Evidence of Learning,” “Assessments,” and “Learning Activities.” The same content is repeated three times, and we would suggest that the duplicates could be removed.
• We have seen quizzes as an assessment in the course, which is intuitive and quick for students because they can immediately get the answer to determine their level of understanding. We suggest that perhaps you might consider adding some explanation to the correct answer, such as why it should be chosen, incorporating some real-life examples, etc., to deepen students’ understanding.

2. Structure and Organization

The overall structure of the learning design plan is a bit confusing, but there are clear headings that initially show each section of content. However, the formatting changes to plain text for the audio and assessment headings and regular formatted headings for the following sections. We understand there are limitations for embeddings that will not allow you to retain the same styling as other elements. Still, it gets a bit confusing when the styling of elements/text on a page switches often. We suggest not using embeddings for the text components of your learning resource, but just plain WordPress blocks and styling for your pages.

Additionally, We believe the text within your content blocks, such as text in the “Overview” section, should have indicators to distinguish the titles of the text sections within it. For example, the “Overview – Savings,” “Misconceptions about Savings,” “Rationale,” and “References” sections within the “Overview” content block could use some additional styling to show that they are the titles for the text that follow them, such as applying the bold style or increasing the font size, or both.

There also seem to be empty content blocks nested between regular content blocks. For example, between “Overview” and “Learning Theory,” there is a blank content block with the text “New text” within it. However, we are not sure if this has to exist for the content itself to exist, but if not, then we believe it should be removed. 

Furthermore we believe that the content of your learning resources should be separated into different pages for each section of content. Not only will this enhance the navigability and accessibility for the learner, but it also will make the structure of your resource more organized overall. An additional benefit is that some of your formative assessments could just be included at the bottom of the page for that topic, enhancing the readability of your learning resource overall.

3. Relevance to Course Content

Your learning design incorporates “direct instruction, collaborative and experiential,” relevant to the course. The learning methods you chose to teach the basic concepts of personal finance through lectures express direct instruction; students will work in groups to develop budgets and create budget simulations, and group activities express collaborative and experiential design. You are applying the content that you learned in our course in a very appropriate way.

Your learning theory mentions “cognitive theory,” which is relevant to the content of our class, and you clearly explain the concept of cognitive theory, which is the idea that cognitive theorists work with learners in appropriate ways to help them discover and use appropriate learning strategies and make connections to prior understanding. We suggest that it would be better if you could integrate cognitive theory with the course content you have designed rather than just explaining what cognitive theory is, as this would provide students with a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the course.

Though the target audience is mentioned as high school students in “Learners and Prior Knowledge,” learners must also have limited knowledge of savings, which may confuse the measurement of how much students know about the topic. If additional details of the requirements can be elaborated or added to each assessment, ideally, this would give learners a better idea of their learning process at the current stage.

4. Interactivity, Inclusivity, and Technology Use

The course has been designed with audio to explain terminology and inserted learning videos with subtitles, which makes the design very inclusive and allows students with disabilities or visual and hearing impairments to learn the knowledge and content in the course in an accessible way.

Regarding technology use, the section describing technology choice explains why the group selected WordPress as the hosting platform for their learning activity. This is a great start, and a brief explanation of the remaining technology choices (YouTube, TTSMaker Text to Speech Converter) and how and why they were selected and used would be a great addition to the section. Additionally, for assessment 3, “Budget Simulation,” we suggest providing suggestions on conducting the group discussion and what technology they should use. For example, based on the assumption that the discussion will most likely be conducted in an online remote setting, you could suggest learners to use Zoom or Microsoft Teams as an online meeting tool as they are both easy to use and most learners will have access to them and have experience using them previously.