Who Are Your Learners? Dirksen Chapter 2

Dirksen talks about the importance of understanding your learners, not just demographically, but also what they know, what motivates them, and how they learn. She breaks down why each component is important and the implications for design:

Blockbusting

In Conceptual Blockbusting, James Adams talks about perceptual blocks to problem solving and creativity. Naming these blocks makes it easier to reexamine your approaches and generate new ways to solve problems. Below is a list of the perceptual blocks and a brief description of each:

How do we remember? Dirksen Chapter 4

This chapter brings up important distinctions in memory and processing and their implications for learning. Memories are formed based on the context and type of information. Humans are active sense makers, not merely robots that regurgitate information. Dirksen…

Designing for Motivation & Learning Environments

Motivation

Dirksen chapters 8 & 9 and Ambrose chapter 3 & 6 talk about the importance of designing for motivation and different learning environments. These are two things that are sometimes overlooked when…

How do students develop mastery?

Mastery and transfer is often the goal of learning. Instructors want to bridge the knowledge gap for learners, but it can be difficult to do so when instructors have built up such sophisticated schemas and chunks of information. I have certainly been in a lot of classes…

What’s the Goal? Dirksen Chapter 3

Similar to what we talked about in class, having a good understanding of the problem will help you…

Designing for Skills

Designing for skills is no easy task, but fortunately, there are design strategies that help make it effective and easier for learners to acquire skills. Two of the essential ingredients necessary for skill acquisition is practice and feedback.

Practice

Engage the Elephant!

Dirksen’s chapter 5 describes how to get and maintain learners attention, which is not an easy task. Staying focused is…

4mat

In class today we talked about the 4mat learning theory, developed by Bernice McCarthy. It is a theory that organizes different learning styles to describe a whole range of the learning and communication experience. It is important and relevant to what we are doing with our client, because we have to think about how…

Mapping out the problem space

After looking at the problems together in class on Tuesday, our team came together to discuss and map out the problem area on our own. We discovered new problem areas as well as areas we would like to continue exploring. We wanted to focus on the many different stakeholder…