Kay Miller IT 5600 5/25/11 Competency #5 Development Postscript As a post-baccalaureate student in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma,

, I took classes in the history of astronomy. One of those classes took me through three thousand years of cosmological thought by reading and discussing primary texts in early mathematics and philosophy. The premise of the course was not only to introduce the changes in theology, philosophy and astronomy over time, but to help students understand ancient mindsets by articulating for ourselves the logic that made the earth-centered model of the universe such a powerful idea for so long. By the end of the semester, I read Galileo Galileis Sidereus Nuncius, in which he describes his discovery of celestial bodies that were invisible to the unaided eye. After spending the entire semester up to that point immersed in pre-modern thinking about the universe, Galileos discovery seemed almost as revolutionary to me as it had been in Galileo's time. A Brief History of Astronomy was an attempt to recreate that powerful learning experience, and in a short period of time, to translate it into an online course. Because I was a novice instructional designer at the time it was developed, the course has features that are inconsistent with eLearning best practices. For example, there are many readings embedded and linked in the course. I dont feel that including extensive reading in an online course is necessarily problematic, especially in a course designed for college students, but the way I designed the pages does require learners to scroll down and increases the likelihood that some will become bored and give up before reaching the bottom, or possibly miss vital information if they do reach the end of the lesson. In future iterations of the course, I would make pages shorter so that theres no need to scroll down, and link important off-site resources on a unique page devoted to external readings. To improve the course for future iterations, I would also deconstruct the original experience

further, not simply attempt to recreate the instructor-led experience as an online course. What worked about the instructor-led course was not the readings or activities by themselves, but the experience of immersion in pre-modern thought and the gradual discovery of new ways of viewing the natural world. Game-based learning, or perhaps an immersive virtual world such as Second Life, could be vehicles for delivering such an experience online in an effective way.