In this project, you will demonstrate achievement of the following competency:
- student profiles to inform the instructional environment
Your first project in this course involves using information about the students in your course (student profile data) to prepare to meet their unique needs and support their success in your online course.
Specifically, you will complete an analysis of the student profile data provided and, based on that analysis, create a course overview to define the specific ways you will provide an appropriate online learning environment for the students.
Read the following instructions, including the Scenario section, for more information about the project and what files you need to submit.
You teach at an online school and are preparing to teach a course in the new school year. Because you incorporate best practices in leveraging student profiles to inform your instruction and provide an online environment that meets the needs and abilities of the students, you’ve collected pertinent information about your new students, using a student profile tool you’ve found useful in the past.
The data you collected is provided for you (refer to the Student Profile Data document in the Supporting Materials section).
Your goal is to analyze that data and create a course overview that represents your plan to meet the students’ specific needs by adhering to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practices and following the Understanding by Design (UBD) practices.
In order to make your work on this project as relevant as possible, you may use your actual school, level, subject, and course. As an alternative, define the parameters yourself, using the project parameters template provided in the Supporting Materials section. With either option, you will submit a completed project parameters template with Part 1 of this project. Once you have defined the parameters, follow the directions below.
To begin planning your instruction for your new course and class, you must analyze the student profile data you collected (provided in the Supporting Materials section). Your analysis must include the following:
- Overview: Provide the completed project parameters template (from the Supporting Materials section).
- Analysis: Summarize what the student profile data set (provided in the Supporting Materials section) tells you about:
- Documented educational supports, if any (i.e., IEP, 504 Plans, gifted students)
- Learning preferences (i.e., learning styles, physical constraints, primary language—ELL)
- Cultural characteristics (i.e., socio-economic situation, religion, non-U.S. born citizens, temporary visas, expats)
- Other characteristics that may influence learning and success (i.e., repeating a grade or course, truancy, health, internet connection reliability)
- Conclusions: Describe what your analysis of the data—in conjunction with best practices for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Understanding by Design (UBD)—tells you about how you can best support learning and engage students. Be sure to reference the sources provided in this course—or credible sources that you select—to support those conclusions. Include your conclusions about the following:
- How applying Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practices is likely to support these specific students and why
- Ways in which it will be useful to incorporate Understanding by Design (UBD) methodology in your course, so these specific students can succeed
- Other conclusions you are able to draw, based on the student profile data analysis
Now that you have a sense of who your students are and what they may need, you are ready to make specific decisions on a number of aspects of your course, documenting them in the form of a course overview, which is not as detailed as a lesson plan. Your course overview must specify the following:
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- Two plans for student grouping
- Explanation of why each grouping option is likely to best support student learning, based on your work on Part 1 of this project
- Two strategies to provide instruction in terms of knowledge and content that are tailored to students’ needs, referencing your work on Part 1 of this project
- Explanation of how these proposed strategies reflect application of UBD and UDL frameworks
Two options (medium and method) you will provide for students to express their understanding of new knowledge- Explanation of why each is appropriate, given your work on Part 1 of the project
- Description of how these methods reflect the application of UBD and UDL frameworks
- Plan for student engagement:
- Two specific ways you will engage students in learning throughout the course, relating to the conclusions you’ve drawn in Part 1 of the project
- Explanation of how each option reflects application of UBD and UDL frameworks
