Day 2, fundamentals

Class today was a bit more on fundamental principles of web-based learning environments, but the concepts seemed to apply to practically any learning environment. Professor Kim suggested that successful learning environments take into account and excel in four primary categories:

1. Audience: You must understand, in detail, who it is that you’re designing for. This should be as specific as possible in order to make the material effective. Without a clear audience in mind, the material could wander off base, or more likely, simply not properly take into account the people for whom it is meant to effect in the first place.

2. Behaviour: What kind of behaviours are you looking to change, and specifically how. These could be formed as “’Audience’ will be able to…” statements in order to show what behavioural outcomes are expected as a result of the learning environment or material.

3. Condition: What physical, technological, and social conditions will your material be used it? For example, will there be electricity readily available? How fast will the internet connections be, if at all? What is the local view of technology, and what are the local uses of it already? All of these things could take a very well-designed piece of material and make it completely unusable if not taken into consideration.

4. Degree: This one hinges largely on the behaviours listed in step 2, but now it is time to add some quantified metrics to those in order to measure success. If the behaviour change desired was that the audience should be able to complete a rubik’s cube, then the metric applied in this step may be the amount of time it takes to complete that puzzle.

These are the ABCDs (clever, right?) of educational design, and I really appreciate the succinct clarity they have over basic design functions. I’m a bit frustrated at the seeming fluidity between some of them, because it seems like a certain statement could be classified as practically any of these four given different context. I think a good portion of that is just my mind, as it is learning, trying to conceptualize through putting everything in it’s own neat little box.

The other important part that I found out of lecture on Wednesday was the evaluation methods – cognitive, meta-cognitive, and attitudinal. When looking at how successful a program was, it is often the case that you can’t simply look at the raw material learned (cognitive), but that you must also evaluate the learner’s perception of their learning (meta-cognitive) and how they felt about the experience (attitudinal). The three together provide a much more complete picture of the effect that a piece of educational material had on one’s life, and a better platform for revisions to the program for future participants.

Here’s to week 3!