Month: August 2025

Peer Review – How to Ensure Your Pet Lives a Long, Happy Life

August 12, 2025 / melissaliao

Resource reviewed: EDCI 335 Assignment 4 Draft – Tony, Joanne, Chad

Clarity of Lesson

The focus on dental care is strong, but since it comes up so often, you could probably highlight it in the introduction so learners know how it is going to be a key part of the course. I would suggest clarifying early on that the course covers both general care and dental health in depth. This would help learners understand how the subtopics are connected from the start.

Clarifying Questions

For the H5P quizzes, when you say “instant feedback”, will the learners just be told whether they’re correct/incorrect or will they be given explanations for incorrect answers? Doing so would be good to further support learning and understanding of key concepts.

For the formative assessment how will the quizzes be different from the multiple choice quiz. Do the learners have to do a blog post and a quiz for each module or is it just one of them?

Alignment

We found your activities to be well structured and designed in relation to the learning objectives outlined in your chart. Each activity is relevant and clearly builds learners’ knowledge of pet care. Additionally, structuring your learning activities to suit the needs of various learning types (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) makes your learning resource accessible for all. The interactive aspect of your activities helps promote learner engagement in the resource as well.

I like how each learning outcome is tied to an activity and a resource. I would suggest making sure that each formative and summative assessment clearly maps to a specific learning outcome, so learners can see how they will be evaluated. Also, ensure by double-checking that LO2’s dental health focus is reinforced in both the formative and summative assessment.

Interactivity

The use of H5P quizzes, drag and drop tasks and the care plan template provide a good base for engagement. You might consider adding at-least one scenario based activity where learners make decisions and see the impact because this will encourage application rather than just recall. Additionally, quick, low effort interactive check-points (1-2 question quizzes) could also help with maintaining momentum.

Inclusivity

UDL could be improved by including the ability to print out materials for learners who face technological barriers or prefer to use a paper version for their learning.

Technology Use and Rationale

Could you incorporate a template or theme that is screen reader friendly to accommodate more learners who may require this tool?

Presentation

For the assessment of the learners we think an area of improvement would be adding more detail in the grading criteria aspect. More specifically, adding sample grading criteria, a rubric, or proficiency indicators would further develop your draft.

Citations

Good work, your overview is detailed and goes over a variety of factors contributing to the healthy life of a pet. Your reference to an academic source (Chowdhury, 2023; Martins et al., 2023) further strengthens the need for preventative pet care. However, one of your sources Martins 2023 focuses on health benefits for pet owners. I believe that adding a different source could strengthen your overview. You might consider reviewing the citation format for uniformity. Also, please make sure every visual and video you include is backed by a citation.

Blog Post #4 – Interaction

August 7, 2025 / melissaliao

Interactive Learning Design Subject: Phishing

1. What kind of interaction would the video require from your students? Does it force them to respond in some way (inherent)?

The video describes what manipulation tactics scammers will use to appeal to people and also lists out real-world examples to familiarize learners with how phishing works. In doing so, it inherently prompts learners to reflect on their own online habits and see if their current habits would make them susceptible to falling for similar phishing attempts. Additionally, by listening to the examples listed in the video, it makes them think “have I ever received a similar message before?” This initiates a personal connection between the video and the learners, and sparks engagement without any explicit prompts.

2. In what way are they likely to respond to the video on their own, e.g., make notes, do an activity, or think about the topic (learner-generated)?

Learners may naturally take notes while watching the video, mentally compare the video’s tips with their prior knowledge, or think back to times when they received suspicious messages. By getting learners to think about their current level of knowledge about phishing, it primes them for active participation later on in the learning resource activities.

3. What activity could you suggest that they do after they have watched the video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity?

After watching the video, learners can complete our “Phish or Legit?” activity that asks them to analyze message intent and structure. The activity will incorporates examples from the video as well as our own curated set of messages. In doing so, it reinforces pattern recognition skills, encourages them to apply what they have learned, and promotes self-reflection. The exercise will be completed on our online interactive learning resource which supports immediate practice and reinforcement of new concepts.

4. How would students get feedback on the activity that you set? What medium or technology would they and/or you use for getting and giving feedback on their activity?

Students would get automatic feedback after submitting their answers (correct/incorrect) and would also get written explanations of why each example was or was not phishing. Learners could also share their feedback about the activities in an online discussion forum, which promotes learner to learner learning.

Blog Post #3 – Inclusive Design

August 7, 2025 / melissaliao

Photo via Tyrone Burke on Carleton Newsroom

How will your interactive learning resource specifically ensure that the needs of all learners can be met?

Our group designed our interactive learning resource, Phishing and How to Protect Yourself, with inclusivity in mind to ensure that the needs of all learners are met. We recognized that learners have diverse needs, learning styles, and digital literacy levels and structured our activities and assessments accordingly.

In the “Activities and Assessment” part of our learning resource, we designed four learning activities with active learning strategies in mind. For example, “Phish or Legit?” is a timed activity that asks for learners to drag and drop real and simulated phishing emails into “Phish” or “Legit” categories. This activity mimics real inbox scanning and provides experiential learning for both visual and kinesthetic learners. Moreover, the “Credibility Detective” activity supports analytical thinkers by guiding them through a checklist they must then use to evaluate different sources in order to determine their credibility.

We also prioritized differentiated instruction when creating our learning resource. The Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning describes differentiated instruction as “[involving] teaching in a way that meets the different needs and interests of students using varied course content, activities, and assessments.” Our activities are scaffolded and begin with simpler tasks, like identifying red flags, before moving on to more complex tasks like analyzing psychological manipulation tactics and verifying suspicious content. In doing so, we allow learners to build confidence at their own pace before tackling the harder activities. Additionally, the “Tactic Decoder” activity allows learners to work in groups, which may benefit those who struggle with individual tasks or those who learn better with group discussions.

To ensure equity and digital accessibility throughout our learning resource, we incorporated real-life examples that could easily happen to anyone, such as malicious emails being sent to your inbox. Additionally, we tried to use plain language to explain concepts in layman’s terms. In doing so, we reduced the amount of technical jargon used so our learning resource can be easily understood by people of varying educational and technical backgrounds. We also addressed common misconceptions in the beginning (e.g. “phishing only happens through email”) to challenge assumptions and broaden our learners’ awareness.

Finally, our assessment plan uses a mix of formats (MCQ, T/F, scenario-based, and matching) to accommodate different strengths. Furthermore, we developed our scoring system to offer constructive feedback to learners and emphasize clear performance thresholds. By offering these performance thresholds, it encourages learners to continue their progress and identify areas of strength while also recognizing where further review or practice is needed. Our approach supports a growth mindset and empowers learners to view assessment as an opportunity for improvement rather than a final judgement of their digital literacy skills.

Works Cited

Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning. “Differentiated Instruction.” Stanford University, (n.d.), https://ctl.stanford.edu/differentiated-instruction.