Welcome to Week Two of Designing for Education! Thanks to everyone who has been jumping into the readings, conversations, and sharing so far. This week, you might continue to explore the Lessons About & From Traditional ID topic. As you do so, I encourage you to really think about the relationship between instructional design and your June modules. What does it mean to design for care? How might traditional ID approach this challenge? What about the intersection of traditional ID and our use of technology? And how has traditional ID come to inform our creation of online learning experiences? As we work through this module, we can start to think about when these traditional approaches align with our practices and when they diverge. Here’s a discussion question where you might share your thoughts?!
If you’re looking for readings this week, I would suggest starting with Peter Goodyear’s Teaching as Design. Goodyear wrote this piece in 2015, suggesting that schools need to adopt a more “designerly” approach to teaching: “universities that find better ways of supporting the design work of their teaching staff will be well placed to meet the changing needs of students.” From there, take a look at Robin’s article Never forget: your course is not only yours. I love how this piece encourages us to think of the design of education more broadly, as an institutional feature that impacts our mission: “We need to shift our mindset to think of course design as a series of acts that collectively bring our college or university into being. Therefore, we need to pause in the act of course design and consider: what does my university need to be?”
At this point, you may be starting to think about how you might apply everything we’ve been talking about to the work you’ve been doing this summer. Try taking a stab at the Defining/Designing activity which might help you better articulate a design challenge you are facing.
If you’re looking for some highlights from last week, I’ll point out just a few:
- Lots of great conversation in the annotation to Hannah’s piece. I love this one from Brad: “Sometimes you have to know something really well in order to do it differently. If you know the principles, ideas, and structures, and then you dig down to the root of them, which is hopefully a good root, then you can take that good kernel. Take that good kernel and not make the same “mistakes” the next time.” I think this is an important reminder that in order to make something new (say an instructional design approach) it’s often important for us to understand the current approach. And, in fact, there may be “good kernels” worth saving.
- Relatedly, Chris wrote a thoughtful reflection to Hannah’s piece in which he suggests some aspects to a militaristic approach that we might consider saving/exploring.
- In another comment on that piece, Molly talks about whether when we’re balancing individuality and standardization of course design we need to embrace a kind of “curricular fidelity.” I can’t get that phrase out of my head, and have been thinking a lot about what that means/looks like!
- There have been LOTS of great portfolio pieces, but I will point to this one by Liz in which she suggests using tech as a kind of “design disruptor.” I’m a big fan of pushing technology to do things it wasn’t explicitly designed to do, and I really like the idea that this could also help disrupt traditional structures that often seem to stifle our learning communities.
That’s it from me! Look forward to seeing you all online!