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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Subject matter experts (SMEs) who teach courses, write textbooks, and contribute to computer-based learning environments, are often “disconnected” from the knowledge they use to solve problems. Much of that knowledge has become essentially automated and therefore the SME can have difficulty articulating it or even realizing that it needs to be articulated. Research on instructional design, educational technology, and problem solving tends to emphasize instructional manipulations at the expense of a careful consideration of what learners need to know. I have developed a task analysis technique called TAPS (Task Analysis by Problem Solving) to elicit the knowledge that SMEs have, and that learners need, to solve problems in a domain. I will discuss the TAPS process and several instructional design and problem solving studies that have utilized TAPS in conjunction with my subgoal-learning model to show how instructional materials can be improved so that learners can learn more effectively and transfer their knowledge to new problems. These projects have been in domains ranging from physics to ballet and have involved instructional materials presented via paper and pencil as well as in multimedia environments.
