Learning Design for Future Higher Education – Insights From the Time of COVID-19 (original) (raw)
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2022: A Practical Guide to Learning Design in Higher Education Disciplines
EdMedia + Innovate Learning, 2022
Learning Design is a new discipline which is becoming mainstream, especially given the last two years of COVID-19 and the suddenly increased need to deliver online learning. However, there is inconsistency in understandings of what it means to be a learning designer. A decade ago, a learning designer was recruited based on their ability to create digital content. In recent years, there has been a push for a more holistic competency profile for learning designers, including pedagogical approaches, instructional strategies, evaluation, and soft skills. Teaching experience or research skills are not required to become a learning designer, although higher education institutions with learning designers do focus on evidence-based practices when deploying online learning. Recently, some universities in Australia have begun offering learning design courses, but there is a shortage of academics in the learning design discipline. As a result, approaches to learning design in the field are often inconsistent and based on guesswork. In this paper, to help the new generation of learning designers, the author shares a decade of experience in learning design and implementing evidence-based learning experiences.
2007
This research explores the learning that took place in three hybrid university-level courses in education, which were designed according to three main design-principles: (a)engage learners in peer instruction, (b)involve learners in assessment processes, and (c)reuse student artifacts as resource for further learning. These principles were employed in different manners according to the goals, contents, and target audience in each of the courses. About 40 graduate, and 260 undergraduate students participated in the study. Data-sources included collaborative and personal artifacts in the courses' sites, researchers' reflective journal, surveys and interviews. We focus on the first design-principle, and show how learning was promoted by features designed according to this principle in each of the courses. We recommend using the design-principles developed in this research to foster meaningful learning in other Web-based courses in higher education. To respond to the challenges described above, the objectives of this research are to formulate designprinciples that translate knowledge about socio-constructivist learning into general guidelines, design hybrid courses according to these principles, explore the effect of these courses on student learning, refine the principles, and contribute them to the Design Principles Database. Context Three hybrid courses that took place at the Department of Education in Technology and Science at the Technion were studied. The courses were designed and taught by the authors of this paper. A brief description of each course follows. Course 1: Educational Philosophy The objective of this course is to help undergraduate students construct an educational philosophy that would lead them as educators or as educational researchers. All the course meetings are conducted face-to-face. The course website guides students through group-activities, some conducted at class-meetings and some, designed to take place in between the meetings. Course activities are built around three dimensions: (1) A theoretical dimension, in which learners study relevant literature and discuss ideas in the area of educational philosophy, (2) a "school inquiry" dimension, in which learners analyze and assess one school they select from a given list of "interesting schools", and (3) the "ideal school" dimension, in which learners apply knowledge gained through the other dimensions by designing and presenting a conceptual model of a school that represents their own educational perspectives. Course 2: Learning and instruction in online environments The course, designed for undergraduate and graduate students, focuses on theoretical and practical aspects in online learning and instruction. The first few weeks take place online and are devoted to community-building and discussion on students' initial perceptions about online learning. In the second part of the course, students work in groups to build their own online "mini-course", which focuses on one issue about online learning and instruction which they specialize in (e.g., creating a sense of a community, the role of the teacher, supporting metacognitive processes, etc.). In the final part of the course students study each others' mini-courses, taught by their peers, provide feedback to each other, and reflect on the whole process. Course 3: Assessment of educational projects The objective of the course is to provide graduate students with tools that will endow them with initial preparation as future assessment experts in science and technology education. The course includes face-to-face meetings and online forum discussions. The students read a diverse collection of articles on assessment, and each week a team of two students is in charge of posing questions and leading the online discussion. Each student is assessed via multidimensional assessment based on her/his contribution to the online forum discussion both as leader and participant, presenting the summary in class, including a comparison with two other articles, and a final project. The students are involved in developing the assessment criteria and their implementation in the course. Methods This study is part of a larger ongoing design-based research that studies the iterative design process of the three courses between the years 2004 to 2007. It explores how refinement of the various features comprising each course affected student learning in several enactments of these courses: 6 enactments of course 1, 2 enactments of course 2, and 3 enactments of course 3. A feature in this study refers to the design of any element that supports learning (e.g., an assignment that guides students in creating presentations of "a day in a student's life" in their ideal school, in course 1; guidelines for using appropriate "voice and tone" when instructing an online course, in course 2; an assignment that scaffolds students in self-assessment, in course 3). The study reported here, is a snapshot of the larger study, focusing on the learning that took place in the current state of design of each of the courses. More specifically, we study how different features in each of the courses, which employ a common design principle affected student learning.
What Matters in Higher Education A meta-analysis of a decade of learning design
Journal of Learning Design
The Journal of Learning Design (JLD) has had a relatively short history of open-access peer-reviewed publication in the broad field of multidisciplinary pedagogy and learning design in higher education with a focus on the innovative use of technology. It began in 2005 and its decade of publication has coincided with a period of great volatility in higher education largely wrought by technology and changes in the demographics and location of our student populations. During this decade, learning design has received growing attention as educational institutions have grappled with shifts to blended learning, incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies in course offerings, and conduct of fully online program suites. MOOCs, certification and badging have swept us off our feet at the same time as increasing scrutiny has been applied to ensure program quality and more efficient delivery methods. The Journal of Learning Design (JLD) has been a contemporaneous witness to this period of change and, along with others of its ilk, has provided an authentic discourse of how our authors, who identify as system leaders, academics and learning designers, have addressed the challenge of a changing learning environment.
Learning, education and collaboration with the support of digital technology
Educational Psychology
Due to COVID-19, 2020 was a challenging year for many, including those within education. Indeed, the impact on the psychology of education was profound and far reaching. Abrupt changes in the learning environment worldwide, including the sudden lockdown of schools, involuntary switching from face-to-face to online instruction and the massive number of students having to cope with parents losing their jobs overnight or even deaths in the family, call for action-relevant research efforts from multiple educational and psychological perspectives in order to generate new knowledge to inform instructional design, assessment, evaluation and educational policies. Contributing to the scholarship on psychological aspects of education is the mission of this journal, Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology. Therefore, the journal presents high-quality empirical research that is relevant to, and extends the literature on, the promotion of learning and teaching across year levels from preschool to tertiary levels. The two special issues published in 2020, namely Civic Education for Alienated, Disaffected and Disadvantaged Students, and Technology-enhanced Learning and Assessment, are particularly pertinent in the current pandemic-stricken school context. A special issue on the educational psychology of learning, teaching and well-being during COVID-19 and beyond (Guest Editors Dr. Ronnel B. King and Professor Ching-Sing Chai) is scheduled for publication in 2022. A call for papers will be announced soon. Through these difficult times, it has been immensely heartening to witness the comradeship of the educational psychology community in extending our knowledge boundary. Despite challenges in 2020, the journal successfully published Volume 40, composed of 10 issues, including two special issues, and the impact factor of the journal rose to 1.586. Included in the 10 issues of Volume 40 were 67 empirical studies by 217 distinguished international scholars from 88 universities/institutes of 27 countries and economies. Each of these studies carries significant messages that inspire and inform policy, research and instructional practice. The success of the journal is the result of a concerted effort from the editorial team, comprising 162 eminent scholars offering generous and gratuitous support in the leadership roles of the Advisory Board, Associate Editors and Consulting Editors. We are particularly grateful to the 248 highly proficient and dedicated pro bono anonymous reviewers from 137 universities and 33 countries. Their expert critiques and advice strengthened the articles remarkably. The current issue, Volume 41 Issue 1, comprising reports on six outstanding empirical studies, is further proof of our continuing commitment to advancing the field of educational psychology. Participants of the six studies reported here were students in higher education from China, Cuba, the Netherlands and the USA. These studies share in common their focus on solid grounding on theories, strong rationale, learner agency, valid research design and well-specified research processes which lead to robust sets of results that are informative for the discipline.
A Proposed Frameworks of the Relationships Between Instructional Design and Learning Psychology
International Journal of Technology and Management, 2023
The Tennyson and Rasch Linking Theory was fundamental in the traditional Instructional Design (ID) in that ID approached the use of ICT in learning from a needs analysis base, considered learning psychology, and then later found a suitable ICT to sort out the problems. Lately, learning has to cater for the evolution of ICTs, now in the fourth and fifth Industrial Revolutions, and for the ICT natives to whom ICTs are part of their culture, who use ICTs to learn. ID and learning facilitators then ask questions on how to use the ICT effectively in learning. This has led to unprofessional adoption of ICTs in teaching and learning devoid of considerations of learning psychology. The evolution of ICTs forces ID to evolve and has seemingly reached crossroads between considerations of subject content, learning psychology or the curriculum and ICTs to sort learning problems out. Predominantly, ID has to evolve in concert with ICTs and their user demands, with consideration of learning psychology. The digital divide between the haves and not haves exacerbate the complexity of the cross of roads. I argue that ID faces a possibility of their roles being taken over by technologists. ID might end up as profession of evaluators of ICT in learning. Therefore, in this paper, I review the Tennyson and Rasch Linking Theory between ID and learning psychology and re-emphasise a need to include learning psychology in ID in the adoption of ICTs to improve learning outcomes.
Changes in online course designs: Before, during, and after the pandemic
Frontiers in Education
The switch to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic became for many university instructors a necessity to familiarise themselves with the institution’s online learning management system (LMS). This switch to online teaching made learning activities, course design patterns, and pedagogical approaches more visible than during face-to-face teaching. Furthermore, the process of translating physical learning activities to the digital space was challenging and needed institutional and leadership support. This paper presents an analysis of the changes made to the learning designs of 102 courses in a university’s LMS before, during, and after the pandemic. Using descriptive statistics and Epistemic Network Analysis we used LMS data to explore the use of LMS features revealing not only the overall university trends, but also faculty differences. In addition, we compared the learning activities as described in course descriptions with the actual learning activities designed i...
Psychological foundations of emerging technologies for teaching and learning in higher education
Current Opinion in Psychology, 2020
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Moving Forward After COVID-19: New Directions for Teaching and Course Design in Higher Education
Revue internationale des technologies en pédagogie universitaire International Journal of Technologies in Higher Education , 2023
This study identifies course design practices and evaluation strategies that promote high-quality, equitable, and inclusive education in hybrid or online modalities, and that consider student wellbeing and mental health, for the post-pandemic era. Our data set consisted of an integrative literature review, interviews with instructors, and focus groups with teaching and learning centre representatives from five countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Lebanon. The study informs instructors’ professional development, recommends concrete course design elements that promote equitable education, and shares innovative pedagogical practices for digital contexts.
The PsyCLE project: Developing a psychology computer-based learning environment
Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 1996
PsyCLEis a 3-year project involving over 30 United Kingdomuniversities to develop multimedia resources for introductory psychology courses. Our goal is to support active learning and encourage students to form a sound understanding of concepts under study. The developments focus on interactive tasks, illustrative case study material, and tools to support critical thinking and analysis. We discuss the rationale for the approach adopted and describe the developed resources and their evaluation and use.