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Design For Learning

See All Design For Learning Articles

Subject Matter Expert (SME) Onboarding 101: Improving development efficiency and course quality through SME training

By Heather Leslie, Alejandra Lizardo / August 9, 2023

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

Using Gamification to Overcome Anxiety and Encourage Play in the Graduate Classroom

By Lindsay Kistler Mattock / July 19, 2023

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

One Interactive Approach to Gamify the Online Classroom: Digital badges

By Tom Dyer, Jacob Aroz, Jean Mandernach / June 13, 2023

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 Through Universal Design

By Carol Rogers-Shaw, Michael Kroth, Davin Carr-Chellman, Jinhee Choi / December 15, 2022

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

Design Thinking and Thinking by Design

By Damien Michaud / October 25, 2022

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

Down the rabbit hole: Revisiting etymology, epistemology, history and practice of instructional and learning design

By Begüm Saçak, Aras Bozkurt, Ellen Wagner / March 31, 2022

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

How Instructional Designers Work and Think in Online Higher Education

By Les Howles / October 27, 2021

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

Designing for Social Connectivity (Not Everyone Likes Webcams)

By William P Lord / April 30, 2021

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

The Burden of Alleviating the Burden During a Pandemic: Emotional literacy as a tool for online course design, adaptation, and evaluation

By Petra Robinson, Maja Stojanović / April 23, 2021

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

Strategies to Build Student-to-Student Rapport in Online Adult Learning Courses

By James Kennedy / February 24, 2021

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

Facilitating Inspiration: Design of the Textiles Archive Design Application (TADA)

By Dan Spencer, Chris Willis, David Tredwell, Jessica White, Kayla Briska / December 10, 2020

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

Facing Global Health Crises Using Mobile Communications: An international virtual exchange experience

By Rosalie Barreto Belian, Lucas Sampaio Leite, José Luiz Lima-Filho, Laura Geer / July 30, 2020

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

Creating an Active Learning Environment using Reproducible Data Science Tools

By Randal Burns / June 30, 2020

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

Helping Students with Learning Disabilities Through Video-Based, Universally Designed Assessment

By Janet Zydney, Casey Hord, Kathy Koenig / May 31, 2020

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