OR Project Teaching

Class assignment: Did you learn about your teaching style in the OR project? -Discuss your teaching strengths and weaknesses from this on the blog.


Since I am doing my OR project on creating an iBook, I have actually created an iBook as a teaching assistant for teaching my project.  To test how well the tutorial was written (so it could potentially be used by students or other teachers outside of a seminar or teaching class) I had my father use the iBook draft to learn how to use iBook Author.  Since he is also a professor he was able to give me feedback in how the tutorial was written and what could be improved.
One of the biggest things I have learned in creating my tutorial and using it to help others is remembering that shorter sentences that are not complex are better.  It is not necessarily the best way to approach instructing someone on a new tool by creating complex sentences with a lot of detail to take in at once.  I have had to go back and re-read my tutorial and look for instances where I put too much information into a single thought where the user would feel overloaded by the information provided.  I have written my tutorial with the understanding that the person using it (on an independent case) knows how to use a computer fairly well and does not need guidance with simple items like how to get to different applications on a computer or how to use the computer in general.  What I did not take into account is problems that someone might run into that is outside of the tutorials pages.  While my father was trying to download iBooks Author we ran into a problem that the Mac he was using did not run Mountain Lion, instead it had Snow Leopard.  iBooks Author cannot be installed on Snow Leopard so we had to work through why the app would not load, trouble shoot the problem, then spend extra time in downloading the new operating system so he could continue with the tutorial.  Even though my father knows a lot about computers and how they operate, he is unfamiliar with how Macs work and it required some extra work to actual get to the point where he could do the tutorial.
As far as my actual teaching style, since I did not instruct him how to use my iBook, since I was testing its independent effectiveness, I will have to wait until I instruct in our class to assess my teaching style.