Education Commons^™

Diverse Avatars And Inclusive Narratives In Virtual Reality Biology Simulations, Amy L. Pate

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Virtual reality lab simulations were reviewed using a process that encouraged the use of diverse avatars and inclusive environments. In a partnership between the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, ASU EdPlus, and Labster collaborated on a process for developing online content that was built with a cultural values framework for language, empathy, and diversity and guided the development of new simulations. This resulted in a proactive process for creating content that was more supportive of ASU’s diverse and online student population.

Embedding Self-Management Into Mobile Learning Experiences, Kinta D. Montilus, Tiantian Jin

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Today’s college students have become increasingly reliant on mobile devices, using them to remain connected, knowledgeable, and social on the go. Undoubtedly, self-management skills play a critical role in students’ ability to independently set goals, monitor their progress, and evaluate and assess their performance while engaging with mobile devices for their learning. This paper will provide an overview of a survey study of mobile learning and offer some self-management recommendations to leverage and support students’ mobile learning experiences.

Working 'Failure' Into Your Learning Design, Nilanjana Saxena Ms.

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

The world is grappling with education failing to meet industry demands for skills. We’re constantly striving to design for learning that is able to meet with the emerging societal and Industrial needs. Against this background what should the learning design strategy be?

Of particular relevance is Productive Failure (PF) a deeper learning design strategy, which runs counter to a traditional Direct Instruction methodology and demonstrates the affordances of experiencing and learning from failure. This brief elaborates on PF, select use cases and applications as well as key design features in operationalising PF.

Schools As Providing Transformational Goods, Sasha Barab

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

In an age of radical innovation, transforming societies, and globalized relationships, our opportunity to unlock human potential has never been more salient. While a variety of approaches have shown promise in this area, achieving this goal at scale has been hampered by thinking and designs that position learning as a process of knowledge transmission and content acquisition. Clearly content has a significant role in increase people potential, but many designs treat context acquisition as necessary and sufficient, neglecting meaningful engagement with one’s life possibilities as an integral part of the learning process. Instead, herein I posit that relevance, use, and …

Lxd: Ten Critical Differences Between Lx And Ux, Jeffrey Bergin

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

The term “Learner Experience Design” is beginning to gain currency. Yet, there is little agreement over what that term means. Is it just user experience design for learners? In my opinion, LX design differs from UX design in ten important ways. Taken together, these differences make the job of learning experience designers quite distinct from the job of user experience designers.

Spotlighting Innovative Use Cases Of Mobile Learning, Alex Rockey, Samantha Eastman, Mindy Colin, Margaret Merrill

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Students bring 2-3 devices to class, 100% of 18-29 year olds own a cellphone and 94% own a smartphone (PEW Research Center, 2018), reflecting ubiquitous mobile device ownership among university-aged students across the U.S. Due to the surge of personal devices, campus infrastructure is increasing capacity to rapidly meet demands for wireless access, and instructors are using mobile learning to push classroom boundaries within and beyond the campus environment. This brief showcases innovative uses of mobile learning uncovered through a cross-campus study at four campuses. Our findings have implications for administrative, funding, information technology, and curricular decisions on individual campuses, …

Toward Formalizing Teleportation Of Pedagogical Artificial Agents, John Angel, Naveen S. Govindarajulu, Selmer Bringsjord

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Our paradigm for the use of artificial agents to teach requires among other things that they persist through time in their interaction with human students, in such a way that they “teleport” or “migrate” from an embodiment at one time t to a different embodiment at later time t'. In this short paper, we report on initial steps toward the formalization of such teleportation, in order to enable an overseeing AI system to establish, mechanically, and verifiably, that the human students in question will likely believe that the very same artificial agent has persisted across …

Drawing Inspiration For Learning Experience Design (Lx) From Diverse Perspectives, June Ahn

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

This article was adapted from a keynote lecture given on June 1, 2018, at the Emerging Learning Design Conference in Montclair, NJ. In this essay, I argue that the emerging practice of learning experience design (LX) affords the opportunity to develop more engaging, innovative, and effective experiences for learners in diverse settings. However, in order to realize this potential, designers must expand our definitions of what counts as a learning experience, for whom, and for what ends. In addition, I challenge us as designers to foreground equity in our designs by beginning with the assumption that whatever learning situations we …

Empathetic Design Thinking To Fuel Your Learning Experience Design, Erin Scully, Kinta D. Montilus

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Based on the workshop, “Empathetic Design Thinking to Fuel your Learning Experience Design” presented at the OLCwELD Spring 2017 Conference, this emerging trends article looks to define design thinking and share a model that educators, instructional/learning designers, and other stakeholders can reproduce and adapt in their respective organizations and institutions.

Lessons Learned From Moocs, Deborah Keyek-Franssen

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

A breathtakingly short hype cycle prematurely sounded the death knell for massive open online courses (MOOCs) while overlooking the value that they bring to the table: massive data that describe the convergence of teaching, learning, and technology at scale.

Online Educational Outcomes Could Exceed Those Of The Traditional Classroom, Elliot King

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

An axiom of online education is that teachers should not mechanically translate existing courses into an online format. If so, how should new or ongoing courses be reshaped for the online environment and why? The answers come both from the opportunities offered by the structure of online education and from a body of research from cognitive psychology and cognitive science that provides insight into the way people actually learn. Freed from the time and space constraints inherent in face-to-face higher education settings as well as the deeply ingrained expectations of both teachers and students, online education provides a more flexible …

History In 140 Characters: Twitter To Support Reading Comprehension And Argumentation In Digital-Humanities Pedagogy, Kalani Craig

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Click-bait headlines that tackle the modern phenomenon of social media often rail against the stultifying effects of too much Twitter. At the same time, productive educational use of Twitter in the classroom is a particularly germane area of study for digital humanists, who consider Twitter a central piece of their community-building practices. This case-study analysis addresses the use of microblogging by using activity theory to understand how social media can be harnessed to help students quickly appropriate the norms of professional historians in a discipline they often encounter as passive listeners in a large lecture course. Students reimagined Prokopios’ biography …

Entering The Digital Commons: Using Affinity Spaces To Foster Authentic Digital Writing In Online And Traditional Writing Courses, Jeffrey Bergin

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Despite the fact that the field of rhetoric and composition has been closely allied to the digital humanities for many years, instructors in these disciplines often remain on their own in terms of adopting, implementing, and evaluating digital technologies. While theoretical scholarship in digital rhetoric is advancing, instructional practices lag behind. Surveying 72 doctoral-granting rhetoric and composition programs, researchers found innovation in the implementation of new media comes primarily from solitary instructors (Anderson and McKee, 74). This article presents several ways in which writing instructors can leverage digital spaces to improve their pedagogies. In particular, the article focuses on digital …

Deeper Learning By Putting Students In Charge Of The Problem Lifecycle, Michael Bieber

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Participatory Learning actively engages students in every stage of the problem lifecycle (including crafting problems for peers, providing solutions, peer grading, and disputes involving self-assessment). This brief motivates and describes the emerging Participatory Learning approach. The discussion then focuses on several issues concerning motivating students, guiding them in conducting the various problem lifecycle tasks, and evaluating participation and learning.

Why Design Matters For Learning Institutions, Jeff Bergin

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Design is becoming a mainstream element in the business world, but it’s been late to reach academia. In this brief, I argue that embracing design is critical for institutions and that design affects learning, outcomes, and enrollment.

Electronic Rubric Grading: Establishing A Foundation For The Future, Jayzona A. Alberto, Jorge Godinez Jr.

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Many institutions of higher education measure learning outcomes through performance-based assessments or rubrics, resulting in the exploration of innovative methods to administer these types of assessments (Anglin, Anglin, Schumann & Kaliski, 2008). At Western University of Health Sciences – College of Dental Medicine, performance-based assessments have been transformed into interactive, electronic versions in which faculty graders use their computers or mobile devices to submit scored rubrics complete with feedback for the students. A major advantage of the software, ExamSoft, we utilize is the ability to link learning outcomes to assessments, resulting in generating robust reports that display longitudinal data for …

Designing Learning With Citizen Science And Games, Karen Schrier

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

This emerging trends article introduces concepts such as citizen science (the inclusion of non-professionals in scientific knowledge production) and knowledge games (games that enable players to solve real-world problems through crowdsourcing and collective intelligence activities within a game). The article shares the strengths and limitations of using citizen science and knowledge games in the classroom, as well as initial tips and guidelines for bringing these types of experiences to the classroom.

Reconceptualizing Pedagogical And Curricular Knowledge Development Through Making, Steven Greenstein, Justin Olmanson

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

While making is typically tethered to narratives of entrepreneurship and business, it can provide a gateway to meaningful interaction and deepened understanding of both content and pedagogy. In this article we provide descriptions of two courses—one each at the pre-service and in-service levels—that engage teachers in making and design practices that we hypothesized would inform their pedagogical and curricular thinking. With a focus on the design of new tools to support teaching and learning through the use of human-centered design practices and digital fabrication technologies, these courses have teachers exploring at the intersection of content, pedagogy, and making. Specifically, they …

The Challenge Of Chinese Character Acquisition: Leveraging Multimodality In Overcoming A Centuries-Old Problem, Justin Olmanson, Xianquan Liu

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

For learners unfamiliar with character-based or logosyllabic writing systems, the process of developing literacy in written Chinese poses significantly more obstacles than learning to read and write in a second language like Portuguese or Cherokee. In this article we describe the linguistic nature of Chinese characters; we outline traditional and new media approaches to Chinese character acquisition; we unpack how multimodal technologies combined with computational linguistics might be used to provide new types of support for Chinese character learning; and we offer a design that incorporates several of these concepts into a digital writing support tool that could work as …

The Memeing Instructor: Increased Attention = Increased Retention, Megan Hodge

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

This brief explains the learning theories that make memes effective vehicles for instruction, discusses where to find popular memes and GIFs which resonate with students and methods of how they can be employed inside and outside the classroom to enhance instruction, and offers tips regarding best practices.

How Voki Implementation Began At Bergen, Beverly Margolies

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

This article describes how VOKI was discovered and implemented at Bergen Community College. Voki is a free multidisciplinary tool to create your own persona by designing a talking avatar to suit your needs. Voki offers customization options for selecting your image, background, and voice. Messages can be delivered in any of 30 languages. At Bergen, Voki has been used in online courses and embedded on numerous web pages. Prior to the May 2015 ELD Conference, Ms. Margolies presented on this topic in 2014 at the Bergen Community College’s CITL Technology Showcase and the NJEdge Annual Conference.

Participatory Culture As A Model For How New Media Technologies Can Change Public Schools, Rich Halverson, Julie Kallio, Sarah Hackett, Erica Halverson

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

This paper addresses the gap between the potential of new media learning tools for transforming learning in and out of schools and the schools’ commitment to technologies that support testing and accountability. We propose the idea of participatory culture as a robust model for how to think about the emerging practices of learning in digital media spaces. Participatory cultures describe the social interactions and activity structures in which real-world learners engage to advance their interests. Participatory cultures retain the concept of consequential outcomes, and add robust accounts of the social and technological ways in which learners interact to attain outcomes. …

Virtual Enhancement To Physical Spaces: A Qr Code Based Orientation Game, Vanessa P. Dennen, Shuang Hao, Sungwoong Lee, Taehyeong Lim

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

University orientations are typically passive events for students, with activities that include sitting and listening to speakers and perhaps talking to others seated nearby. In this project, the authors sought to provide a more active and collaborative component to a university orientation via a team-based game that incorporated content included in a typical orientation and modeled appropriate instructional technology use. This mobile orientation game used QR codes and videos to augment the physical environment of an academic building. This paper describes the design and development process for this game, and presents the results of an evaluation conducted at the end. …

Using The Tool Adoption And Alignment Model To Assess Pedagogical Fit Of Social Communication Tools, Sarah Smith-Robbins

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

While the range of social communication technologies available to educators is vast, so is the pressure to stay up to date and understand which tool has the best potential for use in a specific learning situation. The Tool Adoption and Alignment Model(TAAM) presented here is a process that may help educators make informed decisions about the potential of a tool efficiently and effectively. The model draws from Activity Theory and Genre Ecology Modeling to suggest a method to understand not only the communication and learning potential that is intended by the designers of a tool, but also the ways that …

Designing For Technology Enhanced Activity To Support Learning, Joshua A. Danish

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

One of the perennial challenges in implementing and designing educational technologies is adapting to local contexts. Activity theory has the potential to address this challenge but has not seen widespread adoption due to its complexity. To address this, I suggest a simplified design heuristic for using activity theory to attend to contextual issues when implementing educational technologies. I then present two examples of this heuristic in use. First, I describe the BeeSign software, which was created to help early elementary students engage in complex systems thinking. Second, I describe the design of an online forum intended to foster authentic problem …

Developing The Ultimate Course Search Tool: A Pilot Study, Edina Renfro-Michel, Sailume Walo-Roberts

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Security IT professionals are in high demand, yet university computer science programs have low retention rates. In an effort to increase retention of these millennial students, universities should provide interactive, individualized, student controlled learning. Ultimate Course Search (UCS) was developed to provide an interactive content search learning tool for students. A pilot study was conducted to determine attrition rates, how students use UCS and integrate learning preferences into studying, and the learning outcomes. The retention rates of the experimental class were much higher than that of the control class. Student comments of UCS are discussed.

When Technology Is Too Hot, Too Cold Or Just Right, Jonathan Howell

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Many instructors acknowledge the importance of quantitative literacy in non-STEM fields and may themselves use advanced tools for data analysis, statistics and visualization. But how, if at all, does an instructor introduce quantitative methods into the classroom without overwhelming and disengaging students who may have been drawn to the field precisely because it has not traditionally required any skill or interest in science, technology, engineering or math? I present a model of iterative assignment design illustrated by the evolution of a phonetic exercise in which students are asked to measure vowels from their own speech and to plot their measurements …

Virtual Instructor-Student Interaction: A New Method For Stimulating Class Participation In An Asynchronous Learning Network, Christopher Donoghue

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

The goal of this paper is to describe a new virtual form of instructor-student interaction that can enable students to interact with their instructors without the pressures inherent in a traditional setting where they must face other students. Virtual instructor-student interaction (VISI) is a new pedagogical technique, developed by the author, which involves the transformation of an online survey into a medium that can simultaneously present course material, ask questions, obtain feedback and deliver responses. The interaction takes place asynchronously in a private space between the student and the instructor. By using this method instructors can enable students to grow …

Emerging Learning Design 2013 Conference, A.J. Kelton

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

No abstract provided.