April+6th+class

I was exhausted by the time this class started. I'd been on stage non-stop prior to the class ... I'd presented instructional design information from 9 - 3 at the Teaching and Learning Fair, doing a poster session and a formal presentation that covered the outcome of the Scholar in Residence position that I held two years ago. Teaching fairs such as this are always good because they provide feedback on one's ideas. Visitors (professionals who work in Centers for Teaching and Learning) from Regis, UCCS, the Air Force Academy, Westwood College, and the Denver Community Colleges stopped by my poster and later attended my presentation.

There are creative people in our field. I had two requests for my model (poster sized) and many questions at the formal presentation. One professional attending expressed interest in getting her PhD with us. Teaching this ET702 class week after week was great preparation for having good conversations with these people, who often hire doctoral graduates to work in their centers. One of our previous doctoral students was in attendance, she now works in the Center for Teaching at Regis, Ling Thompson, as an instructional designer.

A common theme through the day affirmed the focus I'm taking with this class. These professionals all voiced concern over the lack of creativity and use of media effectively -- in their own instructional designers as well as with the faculty these designers assist. There is an undercurrent of panic over how slow academic institutions move towards teaching a new generation of students who are ideally situated for constructivist approaches, possessing the skills to be active learners. The "new" student will demand the use of technology, and will be unimpressed with the current level of technology available to faculty.

I required more from the students in my ET695 class (that proceeded ET702). I challenged ET695 students to get away from the "hype" of their technology to focus our attention on how the technology was used **effectively to teach**. I found it very difficult to get students to articulate exactly how a media was promoting learning. The teaching to learning connection that technology affords is not a clear one, and our students don't always see how the media can be used to improve learning. I see a lot of comments like
 * "the (media) allows students to learn anywhere, anytime ", without attention to the challenges of learning outside of class, during a time slot completely devoted to instruction, to a open and random setting that is likely requiring the learner's attention on other things (the split-attention effect)
 * "the (media) allows students to create professional level images", without attention to the reason for creating those images in the first place and how those images strengthened learning a topic. I hear ..." the students are able to create floor plans of their houses" ... but not how that activity strengthened a specific understanding of instructional information. What is the educational goal in the example? Perhaps it is to stimulate learning accurate representations of room dimensions within a set dimension or square footage constraint. It isn't obvious that the media discussed even works with numbers. If students are creating floor plans without working with numbers than what are they really learning? They probably are learning something but what would that something be?
 * "the (media) makes learning fun and is easy to use and engages students because it uses comics", without clear examples of how the comic format strengthened student communication skills (it can help students learn to identify critical passages within an instructional topic, it can help students learn to chunk information ...)

The truth is that it takes a lot of time to see these connections. It takes more than one class. It takes more than reading about Clark and Kozma one time. I thought reading about Clark and Kozma would prepare students to critically examine the role of media. Just reading that series of articles isn't really enough unless students are able to practice, practice, practice analyzing media and its integration. The guest speaker, Doug Merrill, last night (former CIO of Google) emphasized the importance of practice, practice, practice to learning (he had a PhD from Princeton in Psychology and spoke about technology and cognitive load).

In ET702 there is still a technocentric focus, but students are starting to understand that usability helps shape our designs. In the end, when an instructional idea is presented, the audience is not focusing on the details of instructional content, instead they focus on a "gist" of the underlying message. They focus on how easy (efficient) it is for the learner to access that underlying message, and how appealing that message is. Hopefully this leads a potential learner into the content itself. Until that momentum is established, instructional content is likely to be ignored - due to one's limited capacity to hold information. That gist has to be established.

I'm still struggling with how to get students to attend to usability. Some get it quickly, others take more time. I think the ones that take more time have been steeped in learning environments that up to now haven't really been designed for usability. They may think ... "but I learned that way" wondering what all the fuss (in this class) is about. They have not had to focus, up until now, on the importance of making the instructional content accessible, efficient, motivating.

This truly is more difficult than rocket science (see poster heading). My daughter is at IIT, taking rocket science and doing quite well, but she says "I'm a walking calculator, I can easily figure out how to launch rockets because it is a formula. What is missing from my education now is creativity and problem-solving." She'll get that in her jobs and advanced degrees, and can't wait for it. Sometimes I think our doctoral students want the formulas, because to them that is the sign of knowing something. I hope they can see what a creative, challenging and fulfilling task instructional design is. We are change agents. We have a career that matters!