{"id":188552,"date":"2023-07-13T18:23:10","date_gmt":"2023-07-13T18:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.rm.gfolkdev.net\/?page_id=188552"},"modified":"2023-07-13T21:36:19","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T21:36:19","slug":"sample-chapter-design-for-learning","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/rosenfeldmedia.com\/sample-chapter-design-for-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Sample Chapter: Design for Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a sample chapter from Jenae Cohn<\/a> and Michael Greer<\/a>\u2019s book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning<\/em>. 2023, Rosenfeld Media.<\/p>\n

Chapter 1<\/h2>\n

Learning Is an Experience<\/h3>\n

A group of fifteen people log on to a video conference call together. They are gathered to attend a change management training session, all logging in from different locations. Their faces float in their individual squares, arranged in a neat grid. One minute before the session begins, the grid of faces shifts to the side of the screen and is displaced by a screen-shared \u201cwelcome\u201d slide. The facilitator for the session announces that the conversation will begin shortly.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s called a \u201cconversation\u201d is not really a conversation. The facilitator talks for an hour as she progresses through a slideshow. The participants in their separate squares simply listen. Maybe some of them take notes. Others tune out.<\/p>\n

Live online learning experiences like this are common, but they can often feel uninspired and, frankly, boring.<\/p>\n

You could probably make your own list of online learning experiences gone wrong. The slide deck with tiny type that was almost unreadable. The endless blocks of dense informational text that had to be navigated in a pop-up window that looked like it was designed in the 1990s. A \u201cnext\u201d button that can only be double-clicked for some reason. A workshop lacking clear organization and degenerating into chaos. Videos that lack captions. Seminars running over time\u2014by an hour or more. The examples go on and on. But learning designers can do better than all of this.<\/p>\n

Doing better means understanding that learning experiences can\u2019t just be facilitated<\/em>; they must be designed<\/em> in ways that are attentive to an online user experience. Many online classes are designed simply to mimic the experience of in-person learning, largely because facilitators and instructors haven\u2019t been given sufficient training or support in the theory and methods of online learning. Sadly, this lack of training and support has caused many learners and instructors alike to blame the online environment itself.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not the fact of being online that\u2019s to blame for a crummy learning experience. It\u2019s a lack of attention to what people\u2019s experiences are like when they are online. It\u2019s a gap between an understanding of user experience design and actual learning design.<\/p>\n

Designing for learning means designing an environment where users have clear choices. It means creating a space where learners can find what they need in the way that they need it and feel supported all along the way.<\/p>\n

Design for Possibility<\/h3>\n

Learning is often associated with a stodgy, formal environment, like a schoolroom with desks bolted to the chairs. That\u2019s because learning, historically, is a lot about control: pour some ideas into learners\u2019 minds, and they\u2019ll come away with new knowledge. Paolo Freire famously critiqued this model, referring to it as the \u201cbanking model\u201d of education, which assumes that learners are only there as vessels to receive and file away information (like depositing money in a bank).<\/p>\n

But in the last two to three decades, nearly ubiquitous access to the internet and mobile devices has provided platforms that give learners a lot more agency and control in where, when, how, and why they might engage with a learning experience. And while the technology itself hasn\u2019t disrupted \u201cthe banking model\u201d of education, it certainly makes the deficits of the banking model all the more visible. You can try to force leaners online to watch a bunch of videos with no engagement or follow-up. Or you can attempt to keep learners still and silent while staring into a web camera. But you\u2019re definitely not going to succeed. After all, it\u2019s all too easy to get distracted and find new and interesting things to do online. Online, learners are no longer at the mercy of what a teacher tells them to do; instead, they get to navigate through their own experiences because the technology does not keep them confined to one place at a time. If you really want someone to learn something online, it\u2019s important to keep them engaged and give them a reason why they should be there learning in the first place.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s world, successful online learning experiences put learners in the driver\u2019s seat. For example, Codecademy, an online learning platform founded in 2011, offers a large and growing catalog of courses in web design, machine learning, data science, and related subjects in coding languages and computer science. As of 2023, over 100,000 paid subscribers have used Codecademy to learn how to write code (see Figure 1.1).<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/p>\n

Figure 1.1<\/strong>
\nThe Codecademy course enables users to see the how, what, and why of an activity all at once by showing three key pieces of information for a user learning HTML for the first time: a description and purpose for the activity, the terminal for writing the code, and the rendering of what the HTML code produces for the Web.<\/em><\/p>\n

A typical lesson on Codecademy starts with a short introductory text explaining a concept or idea; in this case, how an HTML form works. Learners read through the explanation followed by step-by-step instructions describing the process to build a form. At each step, learners can click \u201cStuck? Get a hint.\u201d A concept review provides a sample \u201ccheat sheet\u201d that can be used to review the main concepts in the lesson, and learners can also check the community forms to see what questions other learners asked about the lesson. In the center window, learners can run and troubleshoot their code in real time, and on the right, they can view the visual output produced by the code (a mockup for a fictional business called Dave\u2019s Burgers<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Codecademy is one of many examples of digital learning platforms that have transformed the experience of learning in the past twenty years; others include LinkedIn Learning (formerly known as Lynda.com) created in 2002, Khan Academy in 2008, and Coursera in 2012. While these platforms have not replaced a lot of traditional learning experiences, they are designed in ways that give learners the agency to stop, start, pause, apply, and re-try new concepts without the time constraints of a formal learning experience.<\/p>\n

A Brief History of Online Learning<\/h3>\n

The seeds of online learning experiences were planted by the internet in the 1980s. Concurrently (in 1984), Malcolm Knowles, an adult learning theorist, created a theory of \u201candragogy\u201d or \u201cadult learning\u201d that posited four key principles as critical to helping adults learn new ideas: having a strong self-concept, having a reservoir of prior learning experiences to draw upon, having a readiness to learn, and having an orientation to what it means to learn. These four principles, he argued, needed to be applied to the growing world of online training experiences, including the integration of a clear stated purpose for the learning experience, a task-oriented way of organizing content, the inclusion of varied learning activities, and room for learner agency and direction. These kinds of principles set the stage for the continued growth of online learning in the 1990s. <\/p>\n

By the 1990s, online courses began to emerge, mostly centered on college campuses, often in states with large rural populations, like Utah, where students would have to travel long distances to attend class in a brick-and-mortar classroom space. Online classes grew steadily throughout the early 2000s and by 2011 about one-third of U.S. college students were taking at least one course fully online.<\/p>\n

The flexibility and ease of accessing online learning experiences has continued to be facilitated by the growth in consumer technologies that make information even more portable and convenient to access. In 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone and launched what has become a thriving ecosystem of digital learning. This growth in consumer technology has made the prevalence of learning experiences online all the greater; learners have to learn how to use their iPhones in order to continue buying and engaging with iPhones. As such, programs such as the Google Analytics Academy, the Meta Community Manager certification, Hubspot Academy, and the Salesforce Trailhead program are all growing and thriving consumer technology education programs, in large part because they count on a growing consumer base remaining interested in becoming better users and learners on the tools of a persistently growing consumer technology ecosystem. Smartphones are now used by many more learners than laptops or other large screens. Even with this unprecedented growth in access to online learning experiences, the need for theories like Freire\u2019s and Knowles\u2019 persisted; increased access did not necessarily mean an increased understanding of how to develop an experience that would really, truly be meaningful to learners.<\/p>\n

The need for an immediately accessible learning experience became even clearer at the peak of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. This catastrophic event forced many people into online learning because of \u201clockdowns\u201d that prevented people from gathering in brick-and-mortar spaces. From early 2020 through the end of 2021, learning experiences across industries were rapidly spun into remote experiences. It\u2019s worth noting that the customer education industry, with companies such as Salesforce and Hubspot Academy leading the way, were leaders in developing online learning experiences prior to the pandemic. However, outside of the customer education industry, remote learning experiences were often considered \u201cinferior\u201d to an on-site class experience. But the experiences of emergency remote learning opened many trainers\u2019 and teachers\u2019 eyes to new possibilities for learning and gave a wider range of individuals more ubiquitous engagement with other learners.<\/p>\n

The rapid rise of \u201cemergency remote teaching\u201d has been an earthquake in the lives of instructors and course designers, and the aftershocks continue today. There\u2019s no unwinding the clock on the experiences that lots of students and professionals alike had with learning online, and the key for learning designers now is to consider how, with deliberate time and planning, the tools for online learning can be designed to be even more attentive to users\u2019 needs. It\u2019s easy to anticipate that online learning will continue to grow because of the following criteria:<\/p>\n