Category: EdTech

Educational design is shifting from Instructional Design, or ID, to Learning Experience Design, or LXD. That might seem subtle, but it makes a world of difference. It’s still designing toward learning outcomes (LO’s) but paying more attention to the learner’s experience. Far too many traditional courses are top-down, sage on the stage, presentation-style, and you either get it or your don’t. Think of how our shopping experiences have been transformed by Amazon.com’s “You might be interested in…” or “others also viewed…” and instant access to customer reviews and alternatives.

This shift also represents a more fundamental influence of video gaming, where user experience is everything, on education. One of the presenters in a recent webinar mentioned what he referred to as The Holy Grail of game design: cognitive flow. This is when the difficulty of a task meshes with your own skill level to reduce both anxiety and boredom. Such a state increases focus, enhances our sense of control, inhibits our self-awareness, distorts the experience of time, and imparts the experience of the task being the only necessary justification for continuing it. I’ve experienced this many times while enjoying a good game, and also in school while pursuing a fascinating topic I had just discovered. It’s lengthening the “Aha!” moment into minutes or hours, and, in college education, has the propensity to profoundly change a person’s life trajectory. I found a nice explanation of this at Gamasutra, and wanted to translate it into good learning experience design.

To drive an equilibrium between skill and difficulty, four things must happen in the course.

1. There must be concrete goals with manageable rules.
2. Instructors must demand actions to achieve those goals that fit within the students’ capabilities.
3. Students must have clear and timely feedback on performance and goal accomplishment.
4. And extraneous distractions must be diminished to facilitate concentration.

Students must have concrete learning objectives and must understand how they are to achieve them. While we all have limits on our information processing and attentional capabilities, students these days are juggling three to five classes, many are working on the side, and striving to build new and/or maintain strong social connections. They’re expected to integrate all of this into some cohesive college career with knowledge transfer between classes and disciplines. Their ability to problem solve and make informed decisions is directly affected by information processing and attentional issues. Clearly defined LO’s with manageable course expectations are achievable, rewarding, and reinforcing to accomplish further LO’s.

Instructors and LXD’s can fix problems with LO’s and rules by thinking carefully about every aspect of the learning experience, from classroom wall decor to mobile LMS app notifications. While students are in a face-to-face class or logged into an online course shell, every element of the environment and/or interface should be geared toward the LO they’re currently working on. Blackboard has a feature, called Adaptive Release, that will hide content until certain criteria that you as the instructor specify are met. Such features or tools can be used to minimize visual stimuli. And the completion of smaller assignments leading up to larger objectives is helpful.

Courses should only demand actions that fit within a student’s capabilities. Stress and performance affect cognitive flow. IF a student is incapable of performing what you consider are basic college-level tasks, get them help ASAP!

_{(This was composed some time back, probably years ago, and languished as a draft on the EdTech @ OWU blog since then, without being published, until now.)}

My first trial of Adobe Spark. Very easy to use, but very limited in customizing or even tweaking options. For example, there was no way for me to resize the images or specify that they should be fully displayed. Spark automatically cropped them, and I couldn’t change it. I tried the Post and Page features and they were both about the same.

Little did I know, as I was watching the big OSU National Championship game with my wife and 11 year old son Monday night, that the winning Buckeyes owed much of their success to an innovative teaching style that’s growing in popularity. It’s a technique that I’ve taught and consulted with faculty to implement, known variously as flipped, blended, or hybrid teaching and learning.

The Wall Street Journal reports on How Urban Meyer Took the Buckeyes to School. The Secret to Ohio State’s Offensive Success: An Unorthodox Method of Teaching. The WSJ? The Ohio State Buckeyes? As Toby West, a local Delaware City Schools Data Coordinator, says, “You can totally do this!”

Keith Grabowski, a former college assistant and founder of Coaches Edge Technologies, says in the article:

“The whole idea is that if you can get players [or students] thinking about it and doing the mental work prior to being in the football facility, your time in the classroom will be that much more productive”

Meyers himself doesn’t use the term flipped classroom, but spoke instead of “on-edge” teaching, “in which players are kept on the edge of their seats during team meetings by a barrage of impromptu quizzes and individual interactions designed to keep them engaged.” This describes active, engaged teaching. And doesn’t it sound exciting? Moving the more passive, information transfer online for students to absorb on their own, at their own pace, is one practical way to make face-to-face class time more dynamic.

As you can see, my last post was in mid-October, lamenting that it was mid-term break already. Here it is December, and winter break is looming. In fact, tomorrow is the last day of fall classes. It has been a busy semester, and I still feel swamped with a Blackboard migration and upgrade looming. Well, back to work.