Assignment

Choose any digital learning tool currently on the market.  Explore it, poke at it, twist it and see if you can break it (in a pedagogical sense, not a technical one).  When you have a good sense of what it does, write a description of the tool, including the intended learners, content, and approach to learning.  What are its strengths and weaknesses?  How should it be evaluated? How could it be improved or extended?  2-3 pages

Response

Synopsis

Udemy is an online course marketplace who’s mission is to “help anyone learn anything” according to their website which also states that every course is “available on-demand, so students can learn at their own pace, on their own time, and on any device.” The platform caters to learners and businesses offering over 35,000 courses ranging from photography to mobile development. At it’s core, Udemy offers an online course publication tool that allows instructors to create their courses and put them up for sale both on Udemy’s marketplace and the instructor’s own website. The instructor sets the selling price and shares the revenues with Udemy at varying rates, depending on who initiated the sale. The instructor keeps 97% of the revenue if the sale originated from their own website and 50% if the sale originated from Udemy’s website.

Learning

Besides the obvious focus on the students, Udemy has a significant focus on the instructor, offering several resources to aid instructors in creating courses. To start with, Udemy offers a free “How to Create Your Udemy Course” which utilizes the platform itself to deliver it. A support website is also available offering several articles such as “Getting Started: How do I create my Udemy Course?”. There is also a closed Facebook group is available for instructors to share experiences, get help and learn from each other. These resources focus on planning, producing, publishing, and promoting the instructor’s courses.

The designers seem to believe that instructors, as learners of the tool, need to understand how teaching online is different from teaching in a classroom. The support material focuses on guiding the instructors on best practices, media quality, and pedagogical styles that best work in this environment. On top of these resources prior to creating a course, Udemy enforces a course review process once the course is ready. This process entails a detailed inspection of the quality of the media, the course content organization, as well as the frequency of different media utilized. For example, a course with only text, only slides, or only videos – will be rejected. A mix of media, quizzes, and presentation styles is therefore valued by Udemy as essential for the learners (students) to succeed.

Content

Judging by the content presented, designers see as barriers to developing an understanding of the subject matter is course planning and digital literacy. Starting with guiding the instructors on learning objectives and general planning of the course, the designers offer basic pedagogical knowledge. Moving on to the production of the course, the designers offer detailed instructions and specifications on audio and video size and quality as well as filming and editing tips, for example. Publishing instructions are also offered guiding instructors on pricing strategies, free course previews and other information about how to make the course more attractive to students. Finally, Udemy provides suggestions on how to drive sales of the course.

Following the content on creating the course, Udemy continues with guides on how to utilize the tools they offer on their digital platform. A strict “Course Quality Checklist” is presented as well as the “Udemy Studio Code of Conduct” which details what is allowed, encouraged as well as what is frowned upon. Interestingly enough, the last session in the “Udemy Teach” section of their site includes “Coding Exercises” which talks about how to create exercises, validate and checking student’s code, and a few example exercises for Javascript, Html, and CSS. This shows a tendency of online courses be heavily geared towards programming courses. My personal guess to why this happens: programming instructors and students have a higher digital literacy and comfort around technology. It is probably harder to find a tech savvy Yoga instructor that publishes an online course as it is to find a Yoga student looking for a strictly online course on Udemy. A quick search shows 155 Yoga courses versus 557 ‘programming’ courses along with 683 ‘development’ courses. Times are changing. 

Technology

The features the designers are leveraging in this implementation revolve around cloud storage and Ajax. Cloud storage means that all the content is uploaded to Udemy’s platform and stored in their environment – including videos – for no extra charge to the instructor. This allows complete control of the content and delivery quality of the courses. Ajax is a ‘modern’ technique of creating web pages that allow dynamic loading of content, draggable elements, and addition of new sections without the necessity of reloading the page. This provides a fluid and intuitive interface that makes the job of creating the course content actually pleasurable.

On the student’s end, the interface is also intuitive, clean, and easy to use. Each section of the course is presented without distractions and provides clear actionable items to control the playback.

Assessment

The success of this tool is publicized on their web page with numbers such as 9 million students, 35 thousand courses, 19 thousand instructors, 35 million course enrollments, 8 million minutes of video content, and 80 languages. Although these are all big numbers by any standard, I would also be interested in looking at the following numbers:

1. Growth rate of the number of instructors joining the platform
2. Time between account creation and course publication
3. Average number of courses published per instructors
4. Average revenue per course
5. Course completion rates by students

I would also be very interested in interviewing instructors who have published courses on other platforms to understand what Udemy’s course publication tool is doing right or wrong. From personal trial and error, I’ve found Udemy’s interface the easiest to use and the one that provides the most scaffolds for the instructor. Their review process is also extremely helpful with attention to minimal details showing that there are actual humans reviewing the course content. This ensures course quality for the students and gives the company a high level of credibility as well as showing their care towards the learner.

Evaluation

Scale: 0 – Absent, 1 – Minimal, 2 – Strong, 3 – Exemplary

The tool is making effective use of unique features of this technology.

2 – Strong: Udemy’s uses the latest Html techniques to provide a good user experience. I would have judged it exemplary if there were a drawing tool embedded in the platform – something like a white board that would record my strokes and voice over from within the tool.

The features of the tool demonstrate an understanding of the target learner.

3 – Exemplary: Udemy course publication tool is setup in a way that it asks for information from the instructor in a structured and familiar manner using terminology commonly used by teachers such as course goals, course summary and other features one would expect in a pedagogical tool.

The design of the tool suggests an understanding of the challenges unique to learning the target content.

3 – Exemplary: Udemy’s wide variety of content, tools and possible interactions amongst instructors show a great care towards the main driver in education – the instructor. They understand that teachers, educators, and subject matter experts may not have all the TPACK necessary to become an online instructor. To supplement this, they try to provide content in various formats with several examples and support for them.

“Activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning. These systems of relations arise out of and are reproduced and developed within social communities, which are in part systems of relations among persons. The person is defined by as well as defines these relations. Learning thus implies becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations. To ignore this aspect of learning is to overlook the fact that learning involves the construction of identities.” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, Ch. 2)

Regardless of your current profession and experience, you have been impacted by education and technology. As we progress in our society, we must think how might we deliver the best educational content, implement the most effective teaching methodologies (pedagogy), and the utilize tools that engage both learners and educators in meaningful learning experiences. Education is one of the most complex issues in our society and has been since the beginning of civilization. Without education, how does a community, a company,  a country, and the human race progress? This paper, along with the Pedagogical Compass (https://prezi.com/zgdhgwrlealw/) will present an overall view of who are the stakeholders, how education happens for educators, how learning happens, and what might we select as relevant content for the future.

Even if you are not directly involved in education, you certainly have faced the need to teach someone, explain how something works, train a new employee, present your research, your work, or your thoughts. With this in mind, we propose to look at educational tools with a set of lenses that might provide an encompassing view when designing effective learning tools. The Pedagogical Compass looks at what we teach (North), how we teach (South), how we learn (East), and who we learn from (West). Through these four cardinal positions we might facilitate and hopefully stir your thought processes based on current research, learning theories, and experiments done in the field.

If we look at user experience designers, we generally consider a tool’s graphical layout, the affordances provided by the tool, it’s usability or ease of use, and finally the service and/or outcome the tool offers. Game designers go a step further in looking at how the user repetitively engage with the tool, reward systems, and how the gamer learns and progresses in the gameplay. One effective framework to use is the “Core Loop” which looks at every step of engagement one has within a game. It involves a cycle which starts with 1) assessment of the current scenario, 2) choosing the correct action, 3) aiming your action appropriately, 4) launching your action, 5) being rewarded (or not) by the consequences of your action. Once rewarded, you go back to step 1 where you assess your next move. By identifying the elements in each of the loop’s nodes we are able to better visualize the process and hopefully improve it. What happens between these nodes should also be considered in order to change the speed of the loop’s cycle.

This approach can be particularly useful in designing a learning tool. The learner, when engaging with new content or knowledge that must be acquired, will first assess what is known, what resources are available and what needs to be achieved. Second step is to choose a potential approach to absorbing the content such as reading, taking notes, and discussing the subject matter with colleagues. Once the action is chosen, one must aim at the appropriate content to engage with, launch your action and finally be rewarded by learning, understanding, and/or comprehending the content. We then continue back to the first step where we assess once again what we know, what we should do, how to apply it, take action, and be rewarded by the results. Yet designing a learning tool is not limited to the learner’s core loop. Learning happens to someone, within a social and cultural context, setup by a teacher, guide, or environment, and the interactions of these elements.

Going back to our Pedagogical compass, let’s first look at what we teach. Is it useful teaching quantum physics to a learner who’s talents lie primarily in the artistic realm? Will a certain content be helpful to get a job or to function better in society? It seems more than plausible to “focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know” (NETP, 2010). Therefore, when designing a learning tool, we must first consider the ultimate goal – the learning objective and outcomes. This approach has been coined by Walters & Newman, 2008 as backward design:

“This backward approach encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first think like an assessor before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine whether students have attained the desired understandings.” (Walters & Newman, 2008)

“One starts with the end—the desired results (goals or standards)— and then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) called for by the standard and the teaching needed to equip students to perform.” (Walters & Newman, 2008)

By preemptively defining how we will evidence the intended learning, we might do a better job when designing and refining each step and activity along the learning/teaching experience.

Now that we have our learning plan in place, how might we effectively transmit this to our learners? How do we teach more effectively? Can we simply use technology to do so? Can we eliminate the teacher from the process? This technocentric approach, where one believes that technological tools alone will transfer knowledge to students is widely criticized. Yet technology makes us rethink education and the role of the teacher in a more profound way:

“Combating technocentrism involves more than thinking about technology. It leads to fundamental re-examination of assumptions about the area of application of technology with which one is concerned: if we are interested in eliminating technocentrism from thinking about computers in education, we may find ourselves having to re-examine assumptions about education that were made long before the advent of computers. (One could even argue that the principal contribution to education made thus far by the computer presence has been to force us to think through issues that themselves have nothing to do with computers.) ” (Papert, 1987)

Therefore we must not only look at the tool but how we use it, and how we interact with the learners when engaging with the content. Learning is a continuous process, a technique acquired that will leverage further and future learning – learning how to learn. Learning that it is possible. One is not born with a certain and immutable level of intelligence. Believing this fixed notion of intelligence is potentially harmful and limits learners to put in the effort into the task. If the learner believes that progression is not possible, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The simple act of praising or criticizing one’s ‘intelligence level’ instead of nurturing the process of learning may prevent learners from having a ‘growth mind-set’ and promoting self-guided interest in development of one’s knowledge base:

“I think educators commonly hold two beliefs that do just that. Many believe that (1) praising students’ intelligence builds their confidence and motivation to learn, and (2) students’ inherent intelligence is the major cause of their achievement in school. Our research has shown that the first belief is false and that the second can be harmful—even for the most competent students. ” (Dweck, 2007)

“Understanding that interest can develop and that it is not likely to develop in isolation is essential. Further articulating the contribution of interest to student learning and its relation to other motivational variables has potentially powerful implications for both classroom practice and conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of interest. ” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)

Now that we have glossed over what we should learn and how we might teach it, we can look at how do we actually learn. Learning is a natural and innate process. We learn how to speak, how to walk, how to interact with our environment, and how to behave in society. We learn not only in formal environments such as schools and training centers, but also in the interaction with others. If we look at children playing video games, research shows that they are naturally learning how to play the game, how to collaborate, and interact with each other with the goal of enriching their experience:

“For these reasons, we do not appeal to the games-are-highly-motivating explanation, but we do see a reason that young people play games and get them tangled up with the rest of their lives, and this reason is cultural. The phrase that best helps us explain it comes from one of our participants, Mikey, who in talking about games said, “It’s what we do.” The “we” he was referring to was kids these days, the young people of his generation.” (Stevens, Satwicz, McCarthy, 2008)

Another powerful concept is that we learn by teaching. What better way to understand a concept but to explain it to someone else? Not only must we utilize our metacognition to access the key elements, but we must articulate in a clear manner so that others can grasp the knowledge at hand. On top of that, humans naturally seem to care more about helping others than helping themselves. An increased level of responsibility and engagement with the content when teaching others is tapped into – it’s called the Protégé Effect. The research looked at how children taught a Teachable Agent (TA) and how this affected their own content acquisition.

“We then introduce TAs, which combine properties of agents and avatars. This sets the stage for two studies that demonstrate what we term the protégé effect: students make greater effort to learn for their TAs than they do for themselves.” (Chase, Chin, Oppezzo, Schwartz, 2009)

“Given our hypothesis that the protégé effect is due to social motivations, we would expect students in the programming condition to be less inclined to acknowledge ” (Chase, Chin, Oppezzo, Schwartz, 2009)

Finally, but not less importantly, we should look at who we learn from, beyond the teacher in it’s most traditional definition. Research shows, along with our common knowledge, that we learn from our peers, from our environment, from the media that we consume and the interactions we engage in while doing so: Joint Media Engagement – the new co-viewing (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001):

“The variety of ways that we saw young people arrange themselves to play games surprised us, especially since most of these ways were interpersonally and emergently organized by the young people themselves.” (Stevens, Satwicz, McCarthy, 2008)

“Parents, teachers, and other adults may wish to share educational resources with their children, but teaching with media and new technologies doesn’t always come naturally, not even for experienced instructors. Provide guidance for the more capable partner in ways that don’t require a lot of prior prep or extra time, actions that can help ensure that the intended benefits of the resource are realized. ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)

With this is mind, the role and actions of the teacher is greatly expanded and complicated since it must consider not only what is happening inside the classroom but also outside the classroom. Engaging students, triggering and maintaining their interest in the content is a great challenge that can be modeled by the Four-Phase Model of Interest Development developed by Hidi & Renninger, 2006, which looks deeply into how interest progresses from an initial casual level of engagement to a more deeply involvement with the subject matter, where the teacher’s role is to provide positive feelings towards the content, generate curiosity to encourage further research, provide opportunities for learning by offering content and pointers towards meaningful resources, and a guide on research to enable learning progression. By providing this, the interest level of a learner will move from Triggered Situational Interest to Maintained Situational Interest to Emerging Individual Interest and finally to a Well Developed Individual Interest.

Designing learning tools might be the most complex challenge we face in our society, not only from a pedagogical standpoint. We must look at the scalability of teaching, content relevance, socio-cultural implications, cognitive developmental stages, interaction with peers, policy, assessments, teacher professional development, costs, and implementation – to list a few. We invite you to become part of this ever evolving field, take on the challenge of creating a better future for humanity, develop, implement and research how might we help spreading knowledge across the world in an effective, considerate and meaningful way. We need designers, teachers, engineers, developers, psychologist, philosophers, doctors, lawyers, leaders, and anyone with a desire and drive to share knowledge and improve the tools we have to do so.

Reading Notes

National Education Technology Plan

• Focus on technology but need to use it for PD
• Focus Areas:
  • Learning
  • Assessment
  • Teaching
  • Infrastructure
  • Productivity

Understanding by Design

• Backwards design or backwards planning
• Clear learning objectives
• How could we incorporate game design practices into education?

Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking

• Ed Tech is not the silver bullet – must come with pedagogy and PD

In-Game, In-Room, In-World

• Kids learn plenty from each other
• Kidification of education

 The Perils and Promises of Praise

• Growth mindset
• Constructive praise – effort and process not ability itself (you’re so smart!)

Four-Phase Model of Interest Development

• Model
  • Triggered Situational Interest
  • Maintained Situational Interest
  • Emerging Individual Interest
  • Well Developed Individual Interest
• Teacher’s interest is probably best predictor of effective teaching
• Teacher’s role is to provide:
  • Positive feelings
  • Generate curiosity
  • Provide opportunities
  • Guide on research

 The New Coviewing: Joint Media Engagement

• Design Guide
  • Mutual engagement
  • Dialogue inquiry
  • Co-creation
  • Boundary crossing
  • Intention to develop
  • Focus on content, not control
• Challenges
  • Parents too busy
  • Parents unaware of needs
  • Don’t enjoy the same content
  • Desired interactions not always triggered
  • Little continuity into other family activities
  • Distraction are always present
• Design principles
  • Kid driven
  • Multiple plains of engagement
  • Differentiation of roles
  • Scaffolds to scaffold
  • Trans media storytelling
  • Co-creation
  • Fit
• “What goes on between people around media can be as important as what is designed into the media”

Teachable Agents and the Protégé Effect

• Care more about pleasing others than oneself, so having someone you need to help enhances learning through teaching this person

 Tangible Bits: Beyond Pixels

• Tangible User Interfaces

 Horizon Reports

• re-teaching our teachers how and what to teach

Paper Planning

Pedagogical Compass

North – what we teach

• Content relevance
  • “focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know ” (NETP, 2010)
  • “It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning and to enable continuous and lifelong learning. ” (NETP, 2010)
  • “Build tools and experiences that revolve around a child’s existing interests, not just prescribed topics. To do so, producers need to design mechanisms that make children’s interests visible and can assist adults in responding to them. ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • “Joint media engagement can be a useful support for developing literacy, including basic reading ability, cultural literacy, scientific literacy, media literacy, and other 21st century skills.” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
• Assessment
  • “technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that, in aggregate, will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system. ” (NETP, 2010)
  • “This backward approach encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first think like an assessor before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up front how they will determine whether students have attained the desired understandings.” (Walters & Newman, 2008)
• Teacher’s interest
  • Teacher’s interest is probably best predictor of effective teaching – Lucas

 South – how we teach

• Teacher Professional Development
  • “Professional educators are a critical component of transforming our education systems, and therefore strengthening and elevating the teaching profession is as important as effective teaching and accountability. ” (NETP, 2010)
• Curriculum construction
  • Backwards design or backwards planning – Clear learning objectives
    • “One starts with the end—the desired results (goals or standards)— and then derives the curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) called for by the standard and the teaching needed to equip students to perform. ” (Walters & Newman, 2008)
• Using technology wisely
  • “Assigning roles to participants so that tasks and content match up to individual maturity is another way of ensuring that everyone is suitably challenged and/or entertained.”  (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • “Parents, teachers, and other adults may wish to share educational resources with their children, but teaching with media and new technologies doesn’t always come naturally, not even for experienced instructors. Provide guidance for the more capable partner in ways that don’t require a lot of prior prep or extra time, actions that can help ensure that the intended benefits of the resource are realized. ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • “Mark Weiser’s seminal paper on Ubiquitous Computing [54] started with the following paragraph:
    “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
    I do believe that TUI is one of the promising paths to his vision of invisible interface. ” (Ishii, 2008)
  • “Combating technocentrism involves more than thinking about technology. It leads to fundamental re-examination of assumptions about the area of application of technology with which one is concerned: if we are interested in eliminating technocentrism from thinking about computers in education, we may find ourselves having to re-examine assumptions about education that were made long before the advent of computers. (One could even argue that the principal contribution to education made thus far by the computer presence has been to force us to think through issues that themselves have nothing to do with computers.) ” (Papert, 1987)
• Student feedback
  • Praise effort and not ability:
    • “I think educators commonly hold two beliefs that do just that. Many believe that (1) praising students’ intelligence builds their confidence and motivation to learn, and (2) students’ inherent intelligence is the major cause of their achievement in school. Our research has shown that the first belief is false and that the second can be harmful—even for the most competent students. ” (Dweck, 2007)
    • “Maybe we have produced a generation of students who are more dependent, fragile, and entitled than previous generations. If so, it’s time for us to adopt a growth mind-set and learn from our mistakes. It’s time to deliver interventions that will truly boost students’ motivation, resilience, and learning. ” (Dweck, 2007)
• Managing motivation and student interest
  • “In fact, teachers often think that students either have or do not have interest, and might not recognize that they could make a significant contribution to the development of students’ academic interest (Lipstein & Renninger, 2006)” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
  • “In general, findings from studies of interest suggest that educators can (a) help students sustain attention for tasks even when tasks are challenging—this could mean either providing support so that students can experience a triggered situational interest or feedback that allows them to sustain attention so that they can generate their own curiosity questions; (b) provide opportunities for students to ask curiosity questions; and (c) select or create resources that promote problem solving and strategy generation. ”  (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
  • “Understanding that interest can develop and that it is not likely to develop in isolation is essential. Further articulating the contribution of interest to student learning and its relation to other motivational variables has potentially powerful im- plications for both classroom practice and conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of interest. ” (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
• Trends (NMC Horizon Reports)
  • Blended Learning
  • Open Educational Resources
  • Digital Literacy
  • Integrating Technology in Teacher Education
  • Rethinking Roles of teacher

 East- how we learn

• Access to education
  • “The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.” (NETP, 2010)
• Growth mindset
  • “Other students believe that their intellectual ability is something they can develop through effort and education. They don’t necessarily believe that anyone can become an Einstein or a Mozart, but they do understand that even Einstein and Mozart had to put in years of effort to become who they were.” (Dweck, 2007)
• Learn from culture
  • “For these reasons, we do not appeal to the games-are-highly-motivating explanation, but we do see a reason that young people play games and get them tangled up with the rest of their lives, and this reason is cultural. The phrase that best helps us explain it comes from one of our participants, Mikey, who in talking about games said, “It’s what we do.” The “we” he was referring to was kids these days, the young people of his generation.” (Stevens, Satwicz, McCarthy, 2008)
• Four-phase model of interest development
  • Triggered Situational Interest
  • Maintained Situational Interest
  • Emerging Individual Interest
  • Well Developed Individual Interest
• Learn by teaching – protégé effect
  • “We then introduce TAs, which combine properties of agents and avatars. This sets the stage for two studies that demonstrate what we term the protégé effect: students make greater effort to learn for their TAs than they do for themselves. ” (Chase, Chin, Oppezzo, Schwartz, 2009)
  • “Given our hypothesis that the protégé effect is due to social motivations, we would expect students in the programming condition to be less inclined to acknowledge ” (Chase, Chin, Oppezzo, Schwartz, 2009)

 West – who we learn from

• Technocentric views
• Learn from peers
  • “The variety of ways that we saw young people arrange themselves to play games surprised us, especially since most of these ways were interpersonally and emergently organized by the young people themselves. ” (Stevens, Satwicz, McCarthy, 2008)
  • “In fact, shared attentional focus on media in real time is a powerful interactional resource not found in most contemporary asynchronous social media, and researchers across a range of disciplines highlight the importance of joint attention for learning and meaning- making (e.g., Barron, 2000, 2003; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008; Bruner, 1983, 1995; Goodwin, 2000; Meltzoff & Brooks, 2007; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Tomasello, 1999, 2003). ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • “Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy’s (2008) naturalistic studies of siblings and friends playing video games together at home examined the spontaneous instances of teaching and learning that players set up among themselves during gaming sessions, as well as how their in-room interactions connect with what’s going on inside the game and in their lives outside the home (e.g., school). ” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
• Learn from teachers who’s roles are to provide: (Hidi & Renninger, 2006)
  • Positive feelings
  • Generate curiosity
  • Provide opportunities
  • Guide on research
• Parents (coviewing)
  • “To get families to use a new platform with any regularity, it should easily slot into existing routines, parent work schedules, and classroom practices. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day to accommodate new practices.” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
  • “What children learn and do with media depends a lot on the content of the media, but they depend perhaps as much on the context in which they are used or viewed, and with whom they are used or viewed.” (Takeuchi and Reed Stevens, 2001)
• Society

Pedagogical Compass Planning

Act 1 – Why should you read this paper?

Want to become a learning tool designer? Care about learner? Care about teachers? Care about reducing the digital literacy gap?

Who are you? Teacher? Policy maker? School leader? Designer? Engineer? Developer?

The compass:

– North – what we teach

– South – how we teach

– East – how we learn

– West – who we learn from

 Act 2 – Evidence

How is LX design similar and different from:

UX designer – consider:

– User

– Usability

– Task at hand

Game Designer

– Learning the game – onboarding instructions

– Engagement – motivation, interest, reward systems, core loop

– Game mechanics

Learning Experience Designer

– Learning objectives

– Differentiation

– Cognitive developmental stages

– Cultural context

– Joint media engagement and co-viewing

– Learning from peers – protégé effect, learn by teaching

Act 3 – Conclusion

LX is probably the most complex type of design there is. Have to consider:

– The learner

– The teacher

– The environment

– The peers

– The cultural context

– Assessment

– Learning objectives

– Policy

– Costs

– Implementation

– Scalability