INDUSTRY INSIGHTS YOUR PEERS ARE READING
In the process of looking at ways to improve the design of courses, the starting point is good objectives. As Van Merriënboer’s 4 Component Instructional Design talks about, we need to separate out the knowledge from the complex problems we apply it to. We then need good processes, so I’ve talked to a couple of educational institutions doing competencies, to see what could be learned. design strategy MORE
I will be dating myself here, but so much of the orthodoxy in the instructional design process was forged back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when the only Computer-Based Training (CBT) tools were Toolbook for the PC, and Hypercard for the Mac. The idea that you might allow scrolling was to many an Instruction Designer taboo. In my blog posts, I’ve been challenging instructional designers to embrace cultural shifts, and evolving technologies rather than brace against them. MORE
And part of it is in the knowledge and skills of the designers, but it’s also in the process. Given that people are far less predictable than, say, concrete, fields like interface design have long known that testing and refinement need to be included. ADDIE isn’t inherently linear, certainly as it has evolved, but in many ways it makes it easy to make it a one-pass process. This has evolved from a similar document I use in (learning) game design. MORE
So I began thinking about performance experience design as a way to keep us focused on designing solutions to performance needs in the organization. From there, we can design forward to create those resources, or make them accessible (e.g. design meta-learning MORE
In thinking through my design checklist, I was pondering how information comes from SMEs, and the role it plays in learning design. And it occurred to me visually, so of course I diagrammed it. So we need a process. Then, of course, there are the war stories. MORE
Given the opportunity, these learners have a burning desire to 'complete' the course. Well-designed and smartly-delivered" MOOCs with a valid, transferable certificate of completion (learning experience) may be 1 viable solution. In this sense, the concept of course completion doesn't really make sense - what is it to 'complete' joining a community? Here's why the C in MOOC continues to stand for 'Course'. Today, of course, they're not necessarily lectures any more. MORE
I was asked the following questions after my presentation to CZ Course RVP_VT21 yesterday: (Elements of Coop.) Look at this post: [link] Notice that though there are no curricular outcomes, the instructor is able to lead students towards the things he thinks are valuable by modelling the process. It's exactly the same process as recognizing your child's face out of a sea of faces. It's exactly the same process as selecting useful content instead of advertising. MORE
We launched the course this week and I did a bunch of things to get ready. First, a media summary view: Figure 63 - media_summary view in the Vide Editor Next, the Course Videos page newly created in the Page Editor. MORE
Of late, a lot of my work has been designing learning design. Helping orgs transition their existing design processes to ones that will actually have an impact. That is, someone’s got a learning design process, but they want to improve it. MORE
Yesterday, a Coursera course was closed after the first week of delivery. It wasn’t the course so much as the buzz from being with people in the same field with the same passion and need to know “stuff”. Coursera provides the platform, but leaves it up to the instructor to design the course, to build the website, and to make it live or not. In this instance, it looks like the instructor decided to shut down the course. MORE
I attended a recent Meetup of the Bay Area Learning Design & Technology, and it led to some insights. I was tapped to host the Learning Design conversation (there were three others: LMS, Measurement, and Social Learning), and that meant that a subset of the group sat in on the discussion. MORE
In Whistler earlier in the year we looked at the wider question of design and moved on in Tasmania to examine design in the context of resilience. In the final retreat of the year we continue the theme of design but this time with a wider focus on value. MORE
Process. Now, I write in several channels: my blog, my committed articles, and of course books. I’ve fixed them, of course, similarly when folks comment in one way or another about something I’ve left confusing or wrong.). Books, of course, are a bigger story. MORE
Ok, so I told you the story of the video course I was creating on what I call the Quinnov 8, and now I’ll point to it. I can’t control it, but as I mention in the course, you want to space it out. The content is organized around what I’m terming the Quinnov 8, the eight elements I think are core to making the step to better elearning design. The elements are: Performance consulting: what to do before you decide to course. design MORE
Videos Recall from the previous part of this series that videos were created and displayed on the Course Videos page. The answer, of course, is keylist. Figure 70 - Media form in Form Editor I've added course, module and event as keylists. MORE
In thinking through how to design courses that lead to both engaging experiences and meaningful outcomes, I’ve been working on the component activities. design MORE
For example, instead of creating a course simply by filling in boxes in predefined forms, I can think about the structure and format ahead of time and design it exactly how I want. This is a process that will probably never end. MORE
In a few weeks, our edX course Data, Analytics, and Learning (#DALMOOC https://www.edx.org/course/utarlingtonx/utarlingtonx-link5-10x-data-analytics-2186 ) will start. We (Carolyn Rose, Dragan Gasevic, Ryan Baker, and I) have spent the last several months thinking through the course structure and format. This is a short overview of the innovations that we want to explore during the course. Many MOOCs reflect a structured and linear process of content presentation. MORE
In fall, we (TEKRI, NRC, UPEI and possibly a few other organizations) are hosting an open online course. The course will run for about 35 weeks and credit options will be available for students in the Athabasca University MDE program and with Georgia Tech. It’s fairly easy to take online courses or interact with your favorite academic these days. Since 2007, numerous people have offered some version of open online courses. MORE
So the form was not something we designed and implemented, at least, not explicitly so. One was the beginning of open online courses. We had both seen them in operation in the past, and had most recently been influenced by Alec Couros’s online graduate course and David Wiley’s wiki-based course. What made these courses important was that they invoked the idea of including outsiders into university courses in some way. MORE
I argued by implication that traditional design thinking prematurely converges on a requirement with is then throw over the wall the creatives to ideate a solution. This is a non-linear process as it is multiple small interactions over time from which a novel solution emerges. MORE
I’ve been thinking a lot about processing in learning of late; what processing matters, when, and why. This is my processing! :). We know processing is useful. One of the questions is “what sort of retrieval (or processing)?” MORE
So, a few weeks ago I ran a survey asking about elearning processes*, and it’s time to look at the results (I’ve closed it). eLearning process is something I’m suggesting is ripe for change, and I thought it appropriate to see what people thoughts. design strategy MORE
And it made me wonder, should there be competencies for processes as well? That is, should your survey validation process, or your design process, also meet some minimum standards? How about design thinking ? So does it make sense to have processes meet minimum standards? One of the things I do is help orgs fine-tune their design processes. I was wondering whether we should certify processes. Based upon learning science, of course. MORE
Getting Ready Connectivism is based on the idea that knowledge is essentially the set of connections in a network, and that learning therefore is the process of creating and shaping those networks. The MOOC environment is designed to support both types of learning. MORE
A number of years ago I wrote a series on design heuristics that emerged by looking at our cognitive limitations and practices from other field. One of the practices I covered briefly in one of the posts was egoless design, and a recent conversation reminded me of it. The context for this is talking about how to improve our designs. This applies to instructional design as well. One of the things we could, and should do, is design reviews. design social strateg MORE
Design thinking has become an increasingly popular topic of discussion over the past decade. Design is no longer just for physical objects, e.g. cars, bridges, shoes, jewelry, smartphones. The application of design thinking beyond products isn’t new. MORE
Out first retreat of 2018 explored the general area of design and innovation. The theme of design was always there from the intiail conception, but the increasing comodisation of design into the linera process of much design thinking creating a context for the programme. MORE
At the DevLearn conference, I ran a Morning Buzz on Learning Design Strategy. I started with a set of questions to address, so I’ll go through their comments in roughly that order (though we didn’t exactly follow this structure): What is learning design strategy? MORE
“Trust the process!”. That’s what we tell ourselves because as designers we often rely on tried and tested tools, methods and standards to help us arrive at a solution that should work. They may sound like best practices for just being a good designer, and they are. MORE
In reflecting on the presentation I gave earlier this week, I realize that I didn’t make it clear that just making it social will make activities lead to better processing. Of course, my goal was evangelizing, but I reckon I should followup with some clarity. There are some design principles involved. First, the assignment itself needs to be designed to involve valuable processing activities. Tags: design social MORE
Last month, I participated in a Design Thinking Lab with network leadership practitioners convened by the Leadership Learning Community. The session was an introduction to design thinking methods and to generate ideas for instructional modules for networked leadership development. MORE
I’ve often complained about how the tools we have make it easy to do bad design. Authoring tools, in general, are oriented on a ‘page’ metaphor; they’re designed to provide a sequence of pages. The challenge isn’t inherent in the tool design. MORE
How should we design? Design for How People Learn (Dirksen). Both of these, of course, aren’t as comprehensive as a book. Of course, it may be that in the process of just designing both that you have some insight. design strategy MORE
One of the major strategic objectives for many HR and L&D departments in 2016 and beyond will be to extend their focus and services beyond courses and out into the workplace. Firstly, we know that learning is a powerful and continuous process that occurs daily at work and throughout life. MORE
I was talking to the ADL Mobile folks about mobile design processes, and as usual I was going on about how mobile is not the sweet spot for courses (augmenting yes, full delivery no). design mobile MORE
A tweet from Joshua Kerievsky ( @JoshuaKerievsky ) led me to the concept of design debt in programming. I started wondering what the equivalent in learning design would be. Obviously, software design isn’t the same as learning design, though learning design could stand to benefit from what software engineers know about process and quality. It’s clear we often take shortcuts in our learning design, and let’s be honest, we seldom go back. MORE
The goal is to choose tasks, with the final task likely being chosen first and working backwards (as in Understanding By Design ) to determine what needs to be done. There’re more details required to fully flesh out the process here. design MORE
A couple of months ago, I posted on thinking about designing, calling for designing ‘backwards and forwards’ And it’s continued to percolate, rightly or wrongly. It occurred to me that when you design your resource(s), that has to happen first. design MORE
The September issue of the Harvard Business Review features a spotlight on The Evolution of Design Thinking. Last week I discussed this expanded view of design thinking based on one of the articles, - Design Thinking Comes of Age. MORE
Birgit Mager has watched service design evolve since the mid-nineties, and has been hugely influential in its development. She holds the first service design professorship at the University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany, is the President and Co-Founder of the International Service Design Network , and Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint , the International Journal of Service Design. Ayla Newhouse [AN]: How did you arrive at service design as your path? MORE
In this course the evidence comes in the form a blog post. We've already done the first three steps of this workflow, and they are basically one-time per course. There are two major problems with the Reader as it is currently designed: - it's slow. MORE
games ) that are the first, best, learning practice you can engage in, of course. What I’m looking for is ways to get learners to do processing in ways that will assist their ability to do. It has learners monitor the process, and then they can turn that on themselves to become self-monitoring. This processing of the rules in context exposes the underlying issues in important ways. design MORE
After about a year of planning, we can finally announce the following courses on edX focusing on learning analytics. The intent of these courses is to eventually lead into a MicroMasters and then advance placement in an in-development Masters of Science in Learning Analytics at UTA. Each course runs about three weeks and we’ve tried to settle on prominent analytics tools for educational data so the experience is one where skills can immediately be applied. MORE
Clark Quinn
OCTOBER 18, 2018
I’ve been thinking a lot about processing in learning of late; what processing matters, when, and why. This is my processing! :). We know processing is useful. One of the questions is “what sort of retrieval (or processing)?”
Clark Quinn
MAY 1, 2019
And it made me wonder, should there be competencies for processes as well? That is, should your survey validation process, or your design process, also meet some minimum standards? How about design thinking ? So does it make sense to have processes meet minimum standards? One of the things I do is help orgs fine-tune their design processes. I was wondering whether we should certify processes. Based upon learning science, of course.
Dave Snowden
JULY 16, 2018
Out first retreat of 2018 explored the general area of design and innovation. The theme of design was always there from the intiail conception, but the increasing comodisation of design into the linera process of much design thinking creating a context for the programme.
George Siemens
SEPTEMBER 11, 2017
After about a year of planning, we can finally announce the following courses on edX focusing on learning analytics. The intent of these courses is to eventually lead into a MicroMasters and then advance placement in an in-development Masters of Science in Learning Analytics at UTA. Each course runs about three weeks and we’ve tried to settle on prominent analytics tools for educational data so the experience is one where skills can immediately be applied.
Clark Quinn
NOVEMBER 12, 2013
I was talking to the ADL Mobile folks about mobile design processes, and as usual I was going on about how mobile is not the sweet spot for courses (augmenting yes, full delivery no). design mobile
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 8, 2018
Getting Ready Connectivism is based on the idea that knowledge is essentially the set of connections in a network, and that learning therefore is the process of creating and shaping those networks. The MOOC environment is designed to support both types of learning.
Clark Quinn
AUGUST 27, 2010
In reflecting on the presentation I gave earlier this week, I realize that I didn’t make it clear that just making it social will make activities lead to better processing. Of course, my goal was evangelizing, but I reckon I should followup with some clarity. There are some design principles involved. First, the assignment itself needs to be designed to involve valuable processing activities. Tags: design social
Clark Quinn
NOVEMBER 4, 2015
In the process of looking at ways to improve the design of courses, the starting point is good objectives. As Van Merriënboer’s 4 Component Instructional Design talks about, we need to separate out the knowledge from the complex problems we apply it to. We then need good processes, so I’ve talked to a couple of educational institutions doing competencies, to see what could be learned. design strategy
George Siemens
OCTOBER 7, 2014
In a few weeks, our edX course Data, Analytics, and Learning (#DALMOOC https://www.edx.org/course/utarlingtonx/utarlingtonx-link5-10x-data-analytics-2186 ) will start. We (Carolyn Rose, Dragan Gasevic, Ryan Baker, and I) have spent the last several months thinking through the course structure and format. This is a short overview of the innovations that we want to explore during the course. Many MOOCs reflect a structured and linear process of content presentation.
Clark Quinn
JANUARY 16, 2019
Of late, a lot of my work has been designing learning design. Helping orgs transition their existing design processes to ones that will actually have an impact. That is, someone’s got a learning design process, but they want to improve it.
Clark Quinn
JUNE 21, 2016
So, a few weeks ago I ran a survey asking about elearning processes*, and it’s time to look at the results (I’ve closed it). eLearning process is something I’m suggesting is ripe for change, and I thought it appropriate to see what people thoughts. design strategy
Clark Quinn
APRIL 25, 2018
In thinking through my design checklist, I was pondering how information comes from SMEs, and the role it plays in learning design. And it occurred to me visually, so of course I diagrammed it. So we need a process. Then, of course, there are the war stories.
Clark Quinn
OCTOBER 14, 2014
games ) that are the first, best, learning practice you can engage in, of course. What I’m looking for is ways to get learners to do processing in ways that will assist their ability to do. It has learners monitor the process, and then they can turn that on themselves to become self-monitoring. This processing of the rules in context exposes the underlying issues in important ways. design
Dave Snowden
SEPTEMBER 27, 2018
In Whistler earlier in the year we looked at the wider question of design and moved on in Tasmania to examine design in the context of resilience. In the final retreat of the year we continue the theme of design but this time with a wider focus on value.
Clark Quinn
JULY 17, 2018
How should we design? Design for How People Learn (Dirksen). Both of these, of course, aren’t as comprehensive as a book. Of course, it may be that in the process of just designing both that you have some insight. design strategy
Clark Quinn
JANUARY 14, 2015
And part of it is in the knowledge and skills of the designers, but it’s also in the process. Given that people are far less predictable than, say, concrete, fields like interface design have long known that testing and refinement need to be included. ADDIE isn’t inherently linear, certainly as it has evolved, but in many ways it makes it easy to make it a one-pass process. This has evolved from a similar document I use in (learning) game design.
George Siemens
FEBRUARY 3, 2013
Yesterday, a Coursera course was closed after the first week of delivery. It wasn’t the course so much as the buzz from being with people in the same field with the same passion and need to know “stuff”. Coursera provides the platform, but leaves it up to the instructor to design the course, to build the website, and to make it live or not. In this instance, it looks like the instructor decided to shut down the course.
Charles Jennings
JANUARY 3, 2016
One of the major strategic objectives for many HR and L&D departments in 2016 and beyond will be to extend their focus and services beyond courses and out into the workplace. Firstly, we know that learning is a powerful and continuous process that occurs daily at work and throughout life.
Clark Quinn
APRIL 11, 2018
I’ve often complained about how the tools we have make it easy to do bad design. Authoring tools, in general, are oriented on a ‘page’ metaphor; they’re designed to provide a sequence of pages. The challenge isn’t inherent in the tool design.
George Siemens
JULY 4, 2011
In fall, we (TEKRI, NRC, UPEI and possibly a few other organizations) are hosting an open online course. The course will run for about 35 weeks and credit options will be available for students in the Athabasca University MDE program and with Georgia Tech. It’s fairly easy to take online courses or interact with your favorite academic these days. Since 2007, numerous people have offered some version of open online courses.
Clark Quinn
DECEMBER 28, 2017
Ok, so I told you the story of the video course I was creating on what I call the Quinnov 8, and now I’ll point to it. I can’t control it, but as I mention in the course, you want to space it out. The content is organized around what I’m terming the Quinnov 8, the eight elements I think are core to making the step to better elearning design. The elements are: Performance consulting: what to do before you decide to course. design
Clark Quinn
AUGUST 21, 2014
The goal is to choose tasks, with the final task likely being chosen first and working backwards (as in Understanding By Design ) to determine what needs to be done. There’re more details required to fully flesh out the process here. design
Clark Quinn
NOVEMBER 29, 2016
At the DevLearn conference, I ran a Morning Buzz on Learning Design Strategy. I started with a set of questions to address, so I’ll go through their comments in roughly that order (though we didn’t exactly follow this structure): What is learning design strategy?
Adaptive Path
MAY 31, 2016
“Trust the process!”. That’s what we tell ourselves because as designers we often rely on tried and tested tools, methods and standards to help us arrive at a solution that should work. They may sound like best practices for just being a good designer, and they are.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
OCTOBER 31, 2016
Design thinking has become an increasingly popular topic of discussion over the past decade. Design is no longer just for physical objects, e.g. cars, bridges, shoes, jewelry, smartphones. The application of design thinking beyond products isn’t new.
Clark Quinn
MARCH 7, 2017
I attended a recent Meetup of the Bay Area Learning Design & Technology, and it led to some insights. I was tapped to host the Learning Design conversation (there were three others: LMS, Measurement, and Social Learning), and that meant that a subset of the group sat in on the discussion.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 28, 2012
Given the opportunity, these learners have a burning desire to 'complete' the course. Well-designed and smartly-delivered" MOOCs with a valid, transferable certificate of completion (learning experience) may be 1 viable solution. In this sense, the concept of course completion doesn't really make sense - what is it to 'complete' joining a community? Here's why the C in MOOC continues to stand for 'Course'. Today, of course, they're not necessarily lectures any more.
Clark Quinn
AUGUST 10, 2009
A tweet from Joshua Kerievsky ( @JoshuaKerievsky ) led me to the concept of design debt in programming. I started wondering what the equivalent in learning design would be. Obviously, software design isn’t the same as learning design, though learning design could stand to benefit from what software engineers know about process and quality. It’s clear we often take shortcuts in our learning design, and let’s be honest, we seldom go back.
Beth Kanter
OCTOBER 7, 2014
Last month, I participated in a Design Thinking Lab with network leadership practitioners convened by the Leadership Learning Community. The session was an introduction to design thinking methods and to generate ideas for instructional modules for networked leadership development.
Clark Quinn
JANUARY 3, 2013
A couple of months ago, I posted on thinking about designing, calling for designing ‘backwards and forwards’ And it’s continued to percolate, rightly or wrongly. It occurred to me that when you design your resource(s), that has to happen first. design
Clark Quinn
AUGUST 20, 2014
In thinking through how to design courses that lead to both engaging experiences and meaningful outcomes, I’ve been working on the component activities. design
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
JANUARY 6, 2012
So the form was not something we designed and implemented, at least, not explicitly so. One was the beginning of open online courses. We had both seen them in operation in the past, and had most recently been influenced by Alec Couros’s online graduate course and David Wiley’s wiki-based course. What made these courses important was that they invoked the idea of including outsiders into university courses in some way.
Clark Quinn
NOVEMBER 6, 2012
So I began thinking about performance experience design as a way to keep us focused on designing solutions to performance needs in the organization. From there, we can design forward to create those resources, or make them accessible (e.g. design meta-learning
Clark Quinn
APRIL 3, 2014
A number of years ago I wrote a series on design heuristics that emerged by looking at our cognitive limitations and practices from other field. One of the practices I covered briefly in one of the posts was egoless design, and a recent conversation reminded me of it. The context for this is talking about how to improve our designs. This applies to instructional design as well. One of the things we could, and should do, is design reviews. design social strateg
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 21, 2018
We launched the course this week and I did a bunch of things to get ready. First, a media summary view: Figure 63 - media_summary view in the Vide Editor Next, the Course Videos page newly created in the Page Editor.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
SEPTEMBER 25, 2018
For example, instead of creating a course simply by filling in boxes in predefined forms, I can think about the structure and format ahead of time and design it exactly how I want. This is a process that will probably never end.
Dave Snowden
OCTOBER 5, 2013
I argued by implication that traditional design thinking prematurely converges on a requirement with is then throw over the wall the creatives to ideate a solution. This is a non-linear process as it is multiple small interactions over time from which a novel solution emerges.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 18, 2011
I was asked the following questions after my presentation to CZ Course RVP_VT21 yesterday: (Elements of Coop.) Look at this post: [link] Notice that though there are no curricular outcomes, the instructor is able to lead students towards the things he thinks are valuable by modelling the process. It's exactly the same process as recognizing your child's face out of a sea of faces. It's exactly the same process as selecting useful content instead of advertising.
Xyleme
APRIL 27, 2012
I will be dating myself here, but so much of the orthodoxy in the instructional design process was forged back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when the only Computer-Based Training (CBT) tools were Toolbook for the PC, and Hypercard for the Mac. The idea that you might allow scrolling was to many an Instruction Designer taboo. In my blog posts, I’ve been challenging instructional designers to embrace cultural shifts, and evolving technologies rather than brace against them.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
DECEMBER 12, 2018
In this course the evidence comes in the form a blog post. We've already done the first three steps of this workflow, and they are basically one-time per course. There are two major problems with the Reader as it is currently designed: - it's slow.
Stephen Downes: Half an Hour
OCTOBER 25, 2018
Videos Recall from the previous part of this series that videos were created and displayed on the Course Videos page. The answer, of course, is keylist. Figure 70 - Media form in Form Editor I've added course, module and event as keylists.
Adaptive Path
NOVEMBER 10, 2015
Birgit Mager has watched service design evolve since the mid-nineties, and has been hugely influential in its development. She holds the first service design professorship at the University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany, is the President and Co-Founder of the International Service Design Network , and Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint , the International Journal of Service Design. Ayla Newhouse [AN]: How did you arrive at service design as your path?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger
SEPTEMBER 29, 2015
The September issue of the Harvard Business Review features a spotlight on The Evolution of Design Thinking. Last week I discussed this expanded view of design thinking based on one of the articles, - Design Thinking Comes of Age.
147 
Let's personalize your content