Week 4 Blog

Empathic Design is something that I have not heard about until looking at the list of designs this week.  It is interesting because empathy is a great way to create relationships with learners and learners tend to learn better from an educator in which they have a good relationship.  By starting the design with what would benefit the learner as far as places to start and what to include is an interesting idea.  This is mainly a corporate design technique.  That would explain why a K-12 educator is not familiar with something like this.  Lenoard and Rayport set out five steps in how to approach this design type (1997).  These five steps are observe, collect data, reflect and analyze, brainstorm, and prototype.  These steps are set up to assess what your learners know, where they are in learning, and what you need to teach to get them the knowledge they need with the minimal about of time.  That is the empathy part, think about your learner and set up learning for them from their perspective.  The models used in K-12 education takes some prior knowledge into account but teaches all aspects of the lesson not just what the learners need to know.  In a classroom, there could be a wide difference in what learners walk into the classroom knowledge and since the educators are responsible for teaching all parts of the lesson, they design lessons to teach all parts that need to be learned.  That is the biggest difference.  This model is something that would work really well in corporate settings.  By designing learning like this, it can help create learning that will hit the mark with people that must complete modules like this in addition to their regular job.  Corporate learning is something that happens to employees that are usually added to their normal job.  Starting design from their perspective could help create some very effective learning.  These instructional designs like this are the results of putting different design theories into practice.  To get the Empathic Design, a designer looks at the theoretical model and then set up an instructional design model from that theory.  These design models are what the instruction follows and that is what the impacts the learner.  The theory behind the learning is what sets up the model but it is the model that sets up the learning.

Leonard, D. & Rayport, J. (1997). Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design. Harvard Business Review November - December 1997.

Week 3 Blog

The Design Document Process

Creating a design document has always been a challenging task for me.  Having to think through the entirety of a course at the very beginning is a very daunting task.  I want to think of all of the possibilities and set up a successful course but I learned through this process that there is no such thing as a perfect course.  No matter how many times you think and rethink, plan and replan, you will always have something that can be improved.  This process has really hit that home with me.  I sat down and was very deliberate about how I designed my course.  I know I am just learning but I didn't expect to not see some of the things that were suggested by my peers.  It really helps to have an outside set of eyes on something.  Often I would imply something in my design.  I would know what I was talking about but it was not clear to anyone else.

With that start, I had some really good feedback on my Design Document.  There is a sentence in my Summary of Analysis that my peer reviewer pointed out.  He needed some clarification on the statement.  It was something that many teachers that I work with had mentioned to me.  I did not provide enough explanation around the statement for it to make sense to an outside party.  I am in the process of going back and changing that part of my paper.  I am going to include more context around that statement to make sure that anyone reading my design document will be able to understand that part.  That one statement is actually the entire reason for me creating this course.  It is to fill a hole I see in the new hire orientation.  It was really eye-opening to see that I missed the point with that statement when it was the beginning issues that I am trying to address.  

I still need to add more on the constructivist philosophy and how it is used in my course design.  I added more to it after getting my paper back but I still need to add more information.  I am looking into more research and documents on that educational philosophy that can be used to strengthen my paper.  I want to use specific references, mentioned by my peer editor, and then explain those references in my paper.  This will give me a more academic feel to the Design Document.

I really learned a lot during this week's assignments.  It is always good to get another set of eyes on your work, no matter what it is, to make sure you are going down the path that you think you are going down.

Week 1 Blog

Starting a project like this can be very intimidating.  Throughout the Learning Technologies coursework, I have created each of these parts in pieces but never put everything together.  It seems to be a daunting task to include all of the things necessary to create an effective course.  The Constructionist learning theory seems to be the one that makes the most sense to me to be used in an online learning environment (Savery and Duffy, 2001).  It allows the learners to learn at their own pace and create material that is meaningful to them.  This gets more engagement from the learners and will then allow them to better retain the material being taught.  This makes the learning more personal and allows the learner to work through the material and create something from their learning.  The course that I am looking to design will help with the new hire technology orientation for my school district.  Right now we are hiring about 300+ teachers each year.  There were 80+ new hires at the high school alone.  We will be opening at least 2 new schools each year for the next 5 to 10 years.  We are a technology-rich district with Chromebooks in every classroom from 2-12 and not all teachers are comfortable with that level of availability.  This is on top of the basic set up new accounts, creating welcome web pages, and setting up phone systems that each new hire must complete before the first day of school.  Larson and Lockee (2009) talk about the importance of design and technology in other areas outside of education.  This includes the training developed and run by HR offices for their new hires.  This done in an online format that allowed access from anywhere a person wanted to learn when they were ready to learn would increase the retention over a set time and place.  These ideas are going to drive the development of my course.  I want the new hires for my district to get access to the course when they complete their account creation training that they attend so they can start working on their technology knowledge before being bombarded with district New Hire Orientation that takes place over 3 days before returning teachers report for in-service days.  Stretching out the learning and allowing learners to go back and repeat modules, learn at their pace, but still ask questions to the course instructors could really change the way new hire training works.  It could allow for more information to be taught and learned to help teachers attack the learning curve of how to teach with the technology we use in my district.  Ruey (2010) sets the bar at changing the passive learning of the corporate world into a more collaborative environment seen in other places.  This will be a challenge to set up but it will help increase the learning in the course I develop.