Learning Objectives
Due to the fact that I am not working with a prescribed curriculum, in order to develop learning objectives for this module, I consulted an existing college-level EAP course. In this existing intermediate-level “academic preparation” course, one of the main objectives is learning to take notes on main ideas and basic supporting details from listening and reading excerpts. This is my main learning objective for this module, though for the sake of narrowing things down, I have decided to focus on note-taking specifically from written and video lecture content. For this specific module, students will complete five online-based learning tasks which are intended to complement in-class material. Note-taking based on reading excerpts will be covered in either another module or course.
While the technology and materials used in my module differ from the original study, the content that Kırkgöz (2010) used for her study form the basis for my module. Topics covered include: learning note-taking conventions and abbreviations; learning how to create an outline for note-taking; learning common lecture discourse markers and actively taking notes from video content. In later learning tasks, students will be required to work with both video content as well as lecture transcripts in order to familiarize themselves with both written and spoken language. Kırkgöz's study showed that students "displayed a recognizable improvement in their note-taking performance" after ten lecture presentations (p. 4349). Thus, these five learning tasks were designed to correspond to five two-hour-long in-class sessions, though in an actual classroom environment, certain topics may take more time to cover than others, depending on student retainment of material.