Welcome to week 3 of Designing for Education! This week, we are switching gears to our second topic, Where Can We Look for Design Inspiration? This topic was a design challenge in and of itself. For one, there aren’t many (any) college instructional designers out there writing about sources of design inspiration that go beyond Bloom’s, ADDIE, Backward Design. Additionally, if we are to move toward a design approach that is based on our individual values, then everyone will be drawn to different sources of inspiration. So how the heck do I design a topic that honors all the individuality and emergence? (Oh wait… this is the crux of all of this, isn’t it?). In my slides and video, I attempt to provide a smorgasbord of inspiration from all sorts of different fields. I point to things that I find particularly helpful in my own design, and try to get us thinking about all the techniques that humans have created in the attempt to wrap their heads around learning and creating process.
Beyond the slides, if you are looking for a suggested pathway for engagement in topic 2, I would recommend starting with Sean Michael Morris’ piece, “Critical Instructional Design.” From there, we have a new category of resource called “Potential Design Inspiration.” We encourage you to explore this menu to find design strategies, principles, and mindsets that directly engage with and complement their personal pedagogical values. There’s already been some fantastic conversation on the article, “Systems Thinking: What, Why, When, Where, and How?”.
Once you are fueled with some background on Critical Instructional Design and some design inspiration, jump into a conversation on our discussion board. Tell us about one or two [sources of design inspiration] that might provide you with useful strategies or approaches. To pull some helpful practices from your exploration, consider jumping into the “Cook Up a Design Bite” activity. Or if you’d like to apply your Design Forward takeaways to a concrete aspect of your teaching, you could complete the “Syllabus Rewrite” activity.
Finally, we have a new (beta) feature of Design Forward for you to try as we finish out the last two weeks of July (and prepare for our August meeting at University Days — more on that next week!). Highlights are a way of “bookmarking” particularly interesting content or conversation around DF so you can a)come back to it later and b) potentially share it when we all meet again. You can find buttons to add highlights from the DF home page and your own portfolio page. In addition, you’ll see a “Highlight This” button now on discussion questions and any portfolio piece. All of your highlights appear at the bottom of your portfolio. Go ahead and start using highlights to store, share, and reflect upon what you’ve found most inspiring this summer! (If you run into any bugs with highlights, feel free to use the “Report Website Issue” in the site footer or let us know on Teams.)
As always, these are just suggestions! Feel free to explore the topic, questions, resources, or activities that inspire you this week!