Designing effective instruction for computer in education courses

The study is R&D comprised of two phases study, the first phase aimed to investigate the problems of teaching educational computing courses and the second phase utilized the results of the study in the first phase to design and develop an effective instruction for computer in education course. In the first phase, questionnaire, interview, and focus group were used as tools to investigate the problems of teaching instructional computing courses at university level. The data was later used for designing instructions in the second phase. In the second phase of study, the researchers designed and developed the instruction according to the problems discovered in the first phase. Three instructional approaches were used to increase the effectiveness of the instruction namely, expository, problem solving and construction method. Different delivery systems were also developed to solve students' problems including, hand-outs, manual, worksheets, CD-title, self-instruction packages, distance learning through the Internet, tutorial, and constant feedback. There were seven instructional packages developed, they were revised twice before putting into field trial. Upon the field trial with 40 second year university students, it was found that all students had done well over mastery level, they produced a high satisfaction on problem solving and construction tasks. It is concluded that the designed instruction helped students learn effectively.