- Home
- Articles
- Reviews
- About
- Who we are
- Write for us
- Contact us
About
- Archives
- Past Issues
- The eLearn Blog
Archives
To leave a comment you must sign in. Please login or create a Web Account. Forgot your username or password? |
||
Create a Web Account:
|
To leave a comment you must sign in. |
||
Create a Web Account:
|
A common challenge for instructional designers and administrators of online programs is ensuring that projects are completed within the development timeframe and course content meets high standards for quality. This article describes a training course that was developed to meet those challenges. The course prepares subject matter experts (SMEs) to work with a design team made up of instructional designers and instructional technologists so that SMEs can plan their course content using a backward design framework. SMEs participate in a fully asynchronous online course with other SMEs where they can collaborate and brainstorm ideas. Having SMEs take an online course that resembles the online course they will later be designing allows them to gain insight from a learner perspective, which can help them design a learner-centered course.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Gamification has been dismissed by some as a passing fad and buzzword in education; however, if approached as part of mindful course design, gamification can enhance student learning and engagement. This article introduces a gamified redesign of a technology-based graduate course using Yu-Kai Chou?s ?actionable gamification.? Chou?s Octalysis Framework defines eight-core drives that describe the psychological motivators found in common gaming mechanics. Adding elements of ?white hat gamification? to the course?which focused on building a sense of accomplishment, empowerment, and meaning making?created an environment that allowed students to overcome their anxieties related to technologies, build digital literacies, and overcome the fear of failure in the classroom.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Gamification, the application of game elements in non-game contexts, is being embraced in higher education, particularly in online classrooms, to foster engagement, participation, and satisfaction. As a quick and effective way to gamify, digital badges serve as virtual rewards for accomplishing specific tasks or goals, stimulating student motivation, promoting community, encouraging critical thinking, developing skills, and bolstering incremental learning, thus making learning tangible and shareable, and driving competition.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: OPINION, DESIGN FOR LEARNING
Profound Learning (PL) can result from online interactions that support practices for deep, lifelong learning. Distance educators can initiate, facilitate, and maintain PL by encouraging thoughtful rather than superficial learning using Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The inclusive nature of UDL provides multiple mechanisms to find that deeper meaning. In this article, concepts and practices drawn from Profound Learning Theory are integrated into UDL guidelines and connected to distance learning to support the development of deep, meaningful, and robust online learning.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING
This article provides a summary and review of "Make It Meaningful: Taking Learning Design from Instructional to Transformational" by Dr. Clark Quinn. The book consists of a section on principles and a section on practices for designing learning experiences that engage learners intellectually and emotionally. The book provides a primer and a playbook for educators to reflect upon and improve their personal practice.
» [Full Article]
REVIEW: LITERATURE,
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING
There is a multitude of terminologies in the field of learning and training to refer to how we design and approach learning experiences: two of them being instructional design and learning design. Online searches and forum discussions among practitioners and researchers reveal the confusion surrounding the use of these terms. Both terms have sometimes been used interchangeably, but the fact that there is more than one term implies that both terms might be used to encompass different aspects of the learning and training discipline. The term instructional design has been a commonly used term until recently, but now learning design made its way to the literature and to our practices.
» [Full Article]
REVIEW: LITERATURE,
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING
This article summarizes the main themes and chapters for The Learner-Centered Instructional Designer (Stylus Publishing, 2021) and provides a critical evaluation and recommendations for prospective readers. The book consists of 19 short essay-like chapters where 20 experienced instructional designers cover a range of topics related to instructional design consulting in higher education. The various authors share practical strategies and best practices about working with instructors to create online courses.
» [Full Article]
REVIEW: LITERATURE,
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING
COVID-19 has forced vast numbers of educational institutions to shift their operations from being delivered face-to-face to being delivered online. As a result, academic institutions have had to scramble to find complex solutions that meet systems-wide online teaching and learning needs. The quality of interaction that occurs between the educator and the student is crucial to the success of delivering education via online technologies, and it is incumbent on the host institution to provide a usable, effective, and satisfying form of communication all participants may communicate with while maintaining a sense of social presence. It requires little effort to compile a list of potential benefits of using webcams in educational settings.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
During the COVID-19 pandemic, most, if not all, courses were shifted to online learning formats. In this article, we share our experiences related to teaching and learning in a completely online, condensed (seven-week) graduate-level course during the fall 2020 semester. More specifically, we discuss the important role of emotional literacy as a mechanism for framing online course design, adaptation, and evaluation. We explore emotional literacy in terms of its necessity in teaching and learning in online contexts during a pandemic, beyond the scope of other obviously important non-traditional literacies, such as technological and informational literacies.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
Students in online classes may have difficulty or believe they cannot develop a rapport with fellow students. There is significant research that indicates that this rapport greatly increases the student?s success in a class. Students can easily build rapport in an in-person classroom and often the instructor is not involved. However, in the online classroom, the problem becomes how do students build this rapport when they only see each other in a virtual space in the classroom to help increase their learning and course success.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
A key goal of textile design education is to provide students entering the field opportunities to develop a strong design process, and beginning students, in particular, must learn about helpful concept development resources and how to use them to initiate design work and provide direction for further research. In addition, sources of inspiration serve an important role in the development of the design process by activating, prompting, and guiding designers? activities.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
This work reports on an international virtual exchange experience based on a digital health discipline that embedded a shared module with curricula addressing mobile communications to face health crises. This course took place in the context of COIL through a partnership between the Federal University of Pernambuco and the SUNY Downstate School of Public Health. The purpose of the experience was for students to develop skills to collaborate in teams made up of health professionals from different countries. The students were able to analyze specific population contexts concerning their communication resources and propose mobile communication strategies to face health crises.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION, INTERNATIONAL ONLINE EDUCATION
After a decade of struggle to help students install and launch machine virtual machines in the cloud, the author migrated his computer science course to the Gigantum data science platform, which automates the delivery of complex software configurations. The goal was to make it easier for students to complete projects so that they could focus on programming rather than system administration. In the process, lectures were redesigned into an active learning experience in Jupyter notebooks in which students run and modify examples as they are presented and can reproduce exactly all work that they have done or has been demonstrated.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING, HIGHER EDUCATION
The problem with many assessments is they impose barriers for students with learning disabilities who struggle with memory and information processing. Traditional assessments often present multiple pieces of information at one time through written text, which can challenge students who have difficulty processing, storing, and integrating multiple pieces of information simultaneously. Simple text-to-speech or computerized read-aloud accommodation cannot address these issues. This is unfair to these students and doesn?t provide an accurate measurement of their knowledge. Therefore, alternative measures that are accessible to students with learning disabilities must be developed. This article will highlight best practices and challenges in creating a video-based, universally designed assessment.
» [Full Article]
TYPE: DESIGN FOR LEARNING