Abstract
Under the national educational policy of Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum, elementary and junior high school teachers are expected to design their own instructional materials, and to teach their courses which could be linked to students’ daily lives. The policy also allocates funding to create a variety of web-based instructional resource systems in order to assist these teachers in preparing their classes. Upon the basis of a user-centered design approach, this study is aimed at constructing a set of suggestions of planning, designing, and developing a web-based instructional resource system for the homeland education. This research team takes Nei-Li area in Taiwan as an example to develop such a system, and constructs a user-centered design model. The study results indicate that, unlike the traditional instructional design approach, the proposed model takes into account the user’s needs, the capability of the project team, the resource availability for implementation, the national educational reform policy, the development of information technology industry, and the socio-cultural context of a community at the initial phase. In addition, the development process is divided into two courses, one for contents design while the other for system construction, both of which are implemented at the same time.
Highlights
Under the educational policy of Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum in Taiwan 1, the elementary and junior high school teachers are expected to be empowered to design their own instructional materials, and to teach their courses which could be linked to students’ daily lives
The team discovers that the national educational reform policy, the development of information technology industry, and the socio-cultural context of a community have a great impact on the construction of instructional resource system for homeland education
Unlike the traditional Instructional Development (ID) model in which the component tasks are usually organized in a linear sequence, the proposed model is divided into two sides, one side representing the content of instructional resources and teacher users, and the other side representing the resource system and digital media designers
Summary
Under the educational policy of Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum in Taiwan 1, the elementary and junior high school teachers are expected to be empowered to design their own instructional materials, and to teach their courses which could be linked to students’ daily lives. To bridge the gap between the developer and the user of an interactive computer-based system such as an instructional resource website, the research team decides to adopt a user-centered design approach. This approach is claimed to be helpful to avoid the blind spot in a design project (Nielsen, 1994), because the potential users would be invited to join in designing and developing the product, and the users’ needs could be taken into account (Jarrett, 2001). Through such a user participation process, the product usability would be enhanced, and the subjective satisfaction of users could be promoted (Riva, 2002)
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