Designing for Knowledge

In chapter 6 of Design for How People Learn, Dirksen describes some of the ways to put things discussed in the previous chapters together. Some of the key guiding questions for this chapter were:

• Will your learners remember?
• Does the learner understand?
• How much guidance should you give your learner?

Some of the key takeaways from this chapter was creating the right amount of friction for learners to make it sticky, as she calls it. This reminded me of the concept of desirable difficulty, coined by Rober Bjork. It is essential to make things challenging and engaging for the learner, but not too challenging. There is a sweet spot between challenge and engagement and sometimes finding that spot can be the most challenging part of teaching. The suggestions provided in this chapter seemed immediately useful in terms of thinking about design ideas for the project. I found the CCAF model to be particularly useful, for providing specific strategies to employ.