“Lifelong learning is crucial to survival of individuals and societies, and therefore there is ongoing critical need for effective learning experience and environment ” In your opinion what are the most crucial aspects of designing as effective learning experience or environment?
When educational materials are designed effectively it will facilitate the achievement of the desired learning outcomes for students, and this could be reached out through successful instructional design process. The perfect atmosphere means that instructional designers have all what it takes to design materials that meet learner crucial need that complete the company ultimate goal and vision, and this mean having:
- The required qualified human resources to fulfill all project requirements like the ID, project manager, graphic designer, multimedia expert, web developer, IT, maintenance team, marketer (Larson & Lockee, 2014, P.41). Even though ID should be prepared to wear several hats in his assigned project, because many institutions require multi-tasked ID who can cover several jobs duties
- Support of the institution administration which include: access to data, believing in the instructional designer which mean trust his investigation and opinion, financial support to meet all project aspects, clear project scope and requirements. This will help the ID to control the amount of changes to meet deadlines and focus more on the quality of the learning outcomes
- Cooperation of SME in-case that the ID is not the qualified person to offer content
- Cooperation of learners and excitement to be engaged in a new learning experience even if it includes using/learning new technological tools (when institutions create a reason for learning adapting new technologies or behaviors will make learning memorable and considered valuable.)
- Understand that new learning or behaviors could be rejected by learners in different aging groups (especially adults) if the designed material didn’t consider theories that explain how to reach out for different groups
- Designing universal material that will meet all learners differences which include disabilities, intelligence, mental capabilities (Larson & Lockee, 2014, P.69)
- Designing variety of materials that respond to learners need and styles which I strongly believe in, even though that some researchers disagree that tailoring instruction following these requirements could improves classroom performance (Larson & Lockee, 2014, P.73). Students nowadays lives in a digital world which is considered major contributor in their learning and information resource. What distinguish this environment that it serves all tastes, students can find pod-casts, videos, images, text, e-books, CD’s….. and each one can choose his preference, this variety of resources proved to motivate learners according to researchers and so improve learning
The instructional designer trip to Mount Everest. Click on the image to understand what it takes to reach out the top of the mountain
Effective learning environment refer to the designed atmosphere the learners will learn through: Face-to-face, distance, and mixed mode or blended delivery models, but the common factor in any chosen environment that:
- It should foster students’ collaboration and communication with each other and with their instructor to improve students’ performance.
- This environment should also enable instructors to collect feedback to assess the learning experiment and evaluate his instructions once again
All the above are major crucial points to consider when thinking of getting effective learning experience or environment, the ID should always think of alternatives and new solutions to complete his/her task, so the crucial items will differ in each working environment according to what is available and what can be obtained.
if I have to choose only one crucial aspect that will make the learning experience effective then I will choose the institution (number 2) that chooses to hire the ID because:
- If an institution don’t know what do they want or what is missing or who’s the best candidates to achieve this task or what should be the budget for such learning initiatives then the upcoming ID and employees will be lost (vision)
- If an institution didn’t create the most convenient working environment for the ID then he will struggle in approaching his goal which is creating effective learning material. For example how can an instructional design apply his detective duties when he have limited communication access to the major SME’s or learners or data that will help him to analyze the situation, ultimately this will affect the final product
- If institution can’t create a motive for their employees to learn, then who will bother himself to spend extra hours in learning new stuff or reshape his past experience. At the end the ID job is to create new learning experience that will furnish a new productive working environment for the sack of that institution, so the cleverest thing they can do is to create a motive for learning and facilitate the learning process without counting too much on self-motivator employees (they are just infrequent). Employees feel that training or learning is just another task that will make their life more complex especially if they have multiple responsibilities or jobs
Noura Sa'd: EDTECH Learning Log 