This semester, while teaching for the first time and taking a course about the epistemological, psychological, and educational foundations of the field of instructional design and technology, along with a course in instructional design and a course in cognitive psychology, I did a lot of generative processing (i.e. integrating and organizing of information from multiple sources about multiple things) about design of learning experiences.
In my initial post at the beginning of the semester about
what constitutes good instructional design, I wrote that good instructional
design is strategic design of learning experiences—based on good, internally
coherent theory and unambiguous evidence—that can help develop learners develop
knowledge and skills. I also wrote that good design of learning experiences is
appropriate for learning objectives, entails a blend of learner analysis and
evidence-based practices, and is conducive to stimulation of active learning
and motivation. Most importantly, I wrote that quality design of learning
experiences is not essentially technology-centric, but can leverage what
technologies offer to enhance learning experiences in learner-centric and
objective-centric ways.
I still agree with everything I originally wrote at the
beginning of the semester—about both quality instructional design and the field
of instructional design—and I think that my own learning experiences have only
built on top of my personal knowledge and beliefs as well as my own
instructional design skills. I think that the changes I have experienced in my
knowledge and in my own instructional design skills can be classified according
to following kinds of changes:
- Changes in my perspective of the field of instructional design
- Changes in my views on the importance of both multimedia and learner preferences to learning
- Changes in my views about motivation
The field of Learning
Technologies a.k.a. IDT
I still stand by the idea that our field—which has been called
many different names, such as the more recent names, Learning Technologies or Instructional
Design & Technology—could have the most “justice done” to its name if
it were called Learning Experience Design
or LX design for short. The essence of the topic of every
practice (research or instructional) of our field is learning. We are a
learning-centric field—learning is built into what we do in our field in the
sense that we must continue to learn to be good at what we do. More
importantly, learning is the object of our obsessions and practices; it’s what
we aim to facilitate and the benefits to others that we strive to offer in the
ways in which we try to offer it.
I have learned this semester—particularly from the course
about the foundations of our field—that research is incredibly important to our
field, more so than I originally thought. Initially, I thought that there were
only three ways in which research is relevant to what we do: (1) quality design
of learning experiences requires “research” in the sense that it involves
learner analysis and evaluation of learners’ demonstrations of their learning;
(2) our field is built on the foundations that research and evidence-based
theories in cognitive psychology and educational psychology have handed to us, and
we add to that body of research-based knowledge through our own research about using
instructional design and technology together to enhance learning; and (3) the
instructional practices of our field are to accord with what research in our
field and educational psychology have yielded. I think this is already a very
research-centric conception of our field, but I have learned that there are at
least two more ways that research is relevant to our field: (4) the research we
conduct in academic departments about the use of instructional design
techniques and technologies informs the academic research communities en masse
about topics specific to our field (i.e. use instructional design and use of
technology), but it also, in many cases, has the potential to inform many
specialized bodies of interdisciplinary research about topics that are beyond
mere use of technology or design (e.g. about science education, cognitive
science, and foreign language education); and (5) research methods and models
can be and often are applied to the design of learning experiences in
workplaces to better understand and improve the effectiveness of instruction,
not simply to evaluate or assess what learners have learned. For example, even
in Kirkpatrick’s model of the four levels of evaluation of
instruction-facilitated learning, research methods are vital to collection of
data about learners and instructional methods.
In a nutshell, I think that our field has moved from its
technology-centric origins at the beginning of the 20th century
towards a more variegated scene of research-centric, learner-centric, and
objective-centric activities that aim to improve learners. IDT activities,
through the historical evolution of our field, have been influenced by
epistemological theories about knowledge, cognitive science views on how people
learn, socio-cultural views on the relevance of social and cultural factors to
how people learn and to what learning objectives should be set, and models of
intelligence that implicitly marry socio-cultural and cognitive science
constructs in order to help guide how we analyze learners and the mechanics of
learning. I think that our field now has the potential to contribute new kinds
of evidence to academic disciplines that try to understand the mechanics of
improvement of cognitive abilities (I kind of hope our field does do this), and
I believe that it is the unique nature of our field that we uniquely attempt to
translate these kinds of evidence into improvements in the ways that we design
learning experiences and facilitate both acquisition of knowledge and skills. To clarify: This semester I wrote a
mid-term and final paper about the relevance of cognitive (working memory)
training interventions to how we prepare learners to be better novel problem
solvers. I think our field is perhaps the best at emphasis on quality task
analysis, and I think that is what is needed to best handle past and present
research about cognitive training, brain training, and the use of interactive
multimedia (e.g. action video games or serious games designed to target
cognitive benefits) to improve human cognitive abilities.
Multimedia and
Learner Preferences
For my instructional design class, I had to write 2 reviews of
recent research articles on an emerging instructional design topic. I chose
adaptivity of hypermedia learning as my topic for which I would find two
relevant articles. I chose this topic because I know from past experience and
coursework that adaptive hypermedia would essentially involve the demand for
using multimedia learning principles to design learning materials, and I was
intrigued by the idea of changes in the multimedia design itself—not just
changes in the way multimedia content is sequenced—as part of responding to
learner performance.
Prior to this semester, I thought that accordance of the
design of learning content to multimedia learning principles is essential to
good instructional design, and I liked the idea of adaptive hypermedia systems
that respond adaptively to a learner based on his or her performances, but not
necessarily in ways that change the multimedia design itself. I had also
thought about the potential importance of learner interests and preferences to
learning, and I had done some of my own digging around in research databases to
figure out that a learning style or cognitive style can be disambiguated to
mean either (i) a preference or (ii) a tendency. However, I had not really
thought much about the prospects of offering learners a choice between one kind
of hypermedia design over another based on their preferences about how they
like to learn. I think I has assumed that learner preferences can stray from
what will actually be more conducive to helping them learn, and that this
attitude towards learner preferences was built into the science of multimedia
learning principles.
So, I chose one article that researched the effectiveness of
giving learners a particular design of video content that aligned with their
learning styles (preference of learning material type). I also chose another
article about the fit between a learner’s choice between variations of learning
materials (static, not dynamic like videos) that could satisfy their preferred
style of learning and conduciveness to learning. After reviewing both articles,
I interpreted their findings as support for my personal view: accordance of a
design of multimedia learning materials to multimedia learning principles is
more important and conducive to learning than is what a learner prefers or
thinks will be the best kind of material.
Furthermore, the change I experienced in my personal views
pertained to my views of the importance of metacognition and self-regulated
learning to learning in hypermedia environments. I think that there are some
important adaptive functions (e.g. adapting to learners’ prior knowledge and
in-course achievements) that adaptive hypermedia can and should perform.
However, I think that neither allowing learners to choose materials based on
their self-concepts and preferences, nor designing multiple designs of learning
materials to accord with differences in preferences is an effective
instructional method; adaptive hypermedia should abandon this function, which
is really a job that should be satisfied by appropriate application of
multimedia learning principles to the facilitation of the learning task. Where
the affordances of well-designed multimedia leave off, metacognition and
self-regulated learning should take over to help better facilitate success in
the learning task. Yes, each learner has individual differences in learning
abilities, prior knowledge, and even in the very experience they have when
“consuming” multimedia learning materials. Yes, sometimes these learner experiences,
no matter how well a particular multimedia design is streamlined to facilitate
learning and minimize cognitive load, can still include cognitive overload.
However, the only thing that can best understand and overcome cognitive
overload is the learner experiencing it, and they will overcome cognitive
overload via self-regulated learning processes that inherently involve a
metacognitive task. Metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive tasks cannot be
offloaded onto a technology or tool outside of the particular learner, but we
instructors can try to design experiences that promote development of
metacognitive skills for overcoming the cognitive overload one experiences.
Motivation
I know that learner motivation is crucially important to learning.
I have known from readings and assignments from past courses (e.g. Learning to
Learn & The Psychology of Learning) as well as from personal experiences
that self-regulation and motivation are important to learning and, generally
speaking, human performance.
Unfortunately I have also had to learn this in a more
distinct way from another kind of personal experience. I have worked in some
workplaces that are not always
conducive to professional development or motivation of its employees. For
example, when I took the Learning to Learn course and Computer Literacy Skills
course together one summer, I was working at a Blackberry retail store where I
experienced some corruption in store management. For example, store managers
were giving my commission for phones I sold, to other employees who had not
sold those phones, yet were friends with the store manager. Even worse, store
managers and select employees were looking through people’s private data
(pictures, videos, texts, browsing histories) on these phones that they were
supposed to be merely charging for people. At this point I should clarify that this
store was not tied directly to Blackberry (RIM); it was a retail store run by a
retail management company. The main store manager was the husband of the
daughter of the owner of the retail management company that ran the store…I
quit after a month! It was really hard to be motivated to work in that kind of
environment, and, the problem—the store manager—likely would not have been
fixed. Plus, let’s be honest, sales in Blackberry smart phones were declining
around that time anyway.
Another experience at the Blackberry store was just as
unpleasant: their online trainings about the features of the different kinds of
Blackberry phones. I had already decided to go into this field prior to working
at the Blackberry retail store and was trying to gain entry to a master’s
program in IDT, but this experience with the trainings there made me want to study
and practice instructional design even more. The online trainings weren’t
videos. They should be characterized as a form of hypermedia that featured
hyperlinks for navigation, text, and images. This kind of hypermedia can be
just as effective as an online video, if not more effective in some cases; the
lack of video content was not the issue. The issue was that the text and images
occupied the same positions. That’s right, the text was on top of the images
such that only half of the text was readable. How can someone learn about a
phone if the image of the phone and over half of the text about it are layered
on top of each other? Basic multimedia learning principle here: they can’t.
You know, our field is essentially about improving learners,
and I identify with this professional identity, but I am having to learn that
others may be in this field for others reasons, and that they may not always
care about what really matters for quality instructional design or professional
development. This realization is probably a good one to have for people in this
field who do identify with the goals of quality instructional design, but the
realization in itself can be a motivation “squasher.” I think that individuals
who share the same professional identities—in terms of identifying with the
goals of quality instructional design—should gravitate towards each other and stick
together. They are probably more likely to get along with one another, motivate
each other, and professionally develop together.
Whereas I used to think that, from the learner point of
view, supporting motivation was primarily the job of self-regulation (when
worse comes to worst, one should always try to be the kind of person who can
count on him or herself for motivation), I now recognize that there are factors
that really can make a difference in a learner’s experiences and enhance
learning and human performance in ways that self-regulation alone cannot. These
factors include self-efficacy, self-confidence, self-concept (e.g. professional
identity), and things external to oneself (e.g. recognition of achievements,
immediate feedback about one’s performance, or constructive feedback in
general) that can help facilitate the presence of the aforementioned factors
that are internal to oneself. I was learning this much from the learning
theories I have encountered, but I think some of the workplace experiences I
have had have helped me understand the importance of these motivational factors
in ways that concrete experiences uniquely can. I can only imagine that there
are some people who have had much worse experiences in workplaces, but have not
been able to learn about motivational factors in the same ways that I have
(i.e. from courses). When one knows about motivational factors, one has a
larger, sharper knowledge base in long-term memory that can be used in moments
of self-regulation.
Lastly, I am intrigued by the concept of flow—in game-based
learning, in learning and human performance in general, and in workplaces. While
I have only scratched the surface of this concept by light reading of brief
articulations of the concept and theory behind it, I look forward to looking
into some applications and operationalizations of the construct in research
about the relationships between flow and learning.
