LXD Spring 2017

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

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…

Understanding by Design

When we truly understand, we:

• can explain: not just a knowledge of facts, but the knowledge of why and how
• can interpret: be able to tell meaningful stories, how facts relate to each other in a linear fashion

Reflections

Throughout the course we have talked about many different types of learning styles and how to design for knowledge. Thinking of ways to apply what we are learning about in the course to the client has been challenging. It is almost like everytime we go to the drawing board we are discovering something new…

Practice Makes Perfect?

In How Learning Works, Ambrose et al talk about practice and feedback. Chapter 5 aims to answer the questions, what are the kinds of practice and feedback that are most productive? We know that they are both important, but how should they be implemented in learning settings? According…

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?

Fun with Math Dice + Khan Academy

Last week in class we split up into our groups to play games. Most of the games had some sort of educational component to it, and our group played a game called Math Dice. The premise of the game is simple:

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…

Engage the Elephant!

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