Rod Sims, Instructional Design for Online Learning, Capella University, [HREF1] USA. rod.sims@faculty.capella.edu
Elizabeth Stork, Assistant Professor, Robert Morris University, [HREF2] Pittsburgh, USA. stork@rmu.edu
With the surge in online learning, educational designers are faced with a range of issues associated with the multiplicity of learner attributes in terms of their learning styles, their culture and their situational/social contexts. In this paper we argue that these factors impact significantly on the ability of learners to productively engage in online teaching and learning environments. Therefore, designers of those environments must not design 'for' those learners, but rather enable those learners to integrate their individuality, experience and culture into the teaching and learning dynamic. Using a case study of a university course to illustrate these alternative approaches, we present a strategy for designing courses that forego assumed learner characteristics and attributes and emphasise the benefits of catering to an 'anyone, anywhere' audience.
The importance of learners as unique individuals who come to the learning environment with particular cognitive styles, intelligences and cultural contexts is critical to effective instructional design. However, because web-based learning can and does occur where physical and geographic boundaries are insignificant, the multiplicity of learner characteristics and circumstances makes web-based learning a potentially rich and more complex milieu. Key questions being raised by designers (and observers) pertain to ways in which teachers can guide students with different learning styles, varying levels of experience and range of cultural experiences to master content and application of content in productive and consequential ways. Can this really be achieved?
In this paper we argue “yes,” but with a different instructional design philosophy, one in which the creation of relevance is taken up by the learner rather than by the teacher/designer. The ability to fashion teaching and learning environments where individual learning characteristics converge to enable the individual student to engage with the content and to achieve the desired outcomes is a critical element of contemporary quality pedagogy.
Established, instructional design methods integrate a set of skills and processes that focus on the creation of resources, strategies, activities, and performance indicators that enable learners to achieve specific objectives (Reigeluth, 1999). Through these methods, instructional designers will often predict or assume certain characteristics of the learners (for example, age, gender, prior knowledge, culture) and build those predictions into the their course plan; in doing this the assumption is made that learners will adapt to the environment presented. While it is acknowledged that design methods have experienced a shift towards the creation of student-centred environments (Jonassen & Land, 2000), recent publications have also emphasised the importance of the student in the design process (Irlbeck, Kays, Jones & Sims, 2006;). Similarly, given the growth of online learning and the diversity of students who may access any given course, the impact of culture, experience and context of the individual student becomes a critical factor for course success (Mcloughlin, 2001; Hinton, 2007; Wang, 2007).
Given this situation, our position is that the role of instructional designer needs to be repurposed so that pre-defined assumptions about the learner are struck from the design process and replaced with an emphasis on what a learner might or could do with the content and activities to achieve course objectives as well as their own educational goals. To accomplish this, instructional designers must create course plans that allow learners to impose their own socio-cultural contexts to the course strategies and content.
To reinforce this notion that the creation of relevance should be taken up by learner rather than designer, we will refer to a common question from course developers: “how do I design a course to cater for learners with different learning preferences?” To respond to this, we argue that the question needs to be re-phrased: “what strategies and activities can I give to students so that they can engage with the content and learning outcomes in a contextual, local fashion – and using their preferred learning strategies”? Taking this approach, the following discussion addresses ways, through a case study, of the ways in which more learner-focused strategies can be implemented.
For the purposes of this discussion it is important to reinforce the significance of design for the web-based learner (Kearsley, 2005; Naidu, 2003; Preece, 2000). Students in web-based learning environments have the potential to heighten their learning experiences because they can think before writing, reflect over longer time horizons, edit their responses, and polish their thoughts before subjecting them to the scrutiny of their peers and instructors. They also can critically weigh their peers’ ideas before responding, react more intentionally, and check the accuracy of their opinions or assertions. Students benefit by using the opportunity to engage more thoughtfully than they often do when called on to respond on demand in a classroom or on an in-class exam. Similarly teachers have more flexibility in the way they interact, with the capacity to tailor subsequent lessons and responses to meet students where they are, individually and collectively. Web-based learning truly becomes an “anyone, anywhere” learning environment.
In essence the web-learning environment enables learners to find out what they don’t know in an unthreatening, personal space. They can try out multiple ways to acquire information and apply or practice that knowledge, they can gain insights and develop critical thinking skills through thoughtful engagement in a less immediate, but still interactive, environment and they can use an iterative process that is not always readily available in a classroom. And to achieve this, we reiterate the importance for those developing online courses to place the emphasis for creation of relevance on the learner, rather than it being solely the role of the designer.
In a recent paper on web-based design for teaching, Rogers, Graham, and Mayes (2007) suggested that people who design web-based courses must be culturally aware of the diverse backgrounds (norms, values, practices) of their audience/students. Rogers et al. (2007) concluded that designers need to effectively situate themselves in the other culture and offer assignments that mean something to the learner. As proposed in the introduction, we argue that this is not the most efficacious approach, because teachers/designers should not (or cannot) make assumptions about how content should be learned to meet specific and concrete objectives. Rather, they should structure courses so that students, using their own styles, experiences, culture, and context as a framework can learn in the most productive way for meeting more abstract “knowing” objectives. In developing a course on multicultural diversity for example, designers should not focus on creating a course where, say, white, Australian, middle class, Christian students will come to understand what people of other races, classes, nationalities, and religious affiliations value and how they demonstrate those values through their behaviors. Rather, instructional designers should enable students of all kinds (“anyone, anywhere”) to select from resources and ideas that will help them become aware of how they construct their own identities and, then, apply that same understanding of construction of identity to people different from themselves.
Figure 1 represents a classical Instructional Design process which focuses on establishing a set of strategies, activities and performance indicators that will meet the learning needs of a specific target population who are presumed to have certain learning styles or multiple intelligences, culture, prior knowledge, media preferences and social contexts. Once the course is developed, the targeted learner will use it with those elements prescriptively embedded in the formal course structure.
Figure 1: Learner Attributes Embedded in Course Structure
However, we contend that classifying and predicting the particular characteristics learners bring to a course is presumptive, especially with for “anyone, anywhere” web-based learning. Instead, the design of courses, especially those that are to be offered in a wide range of contexts and geographies, should focus on strategies and performance indicators while allowing learners, with their individual sets of characteristics, to manage their learning processes and engage with both instructors and other learners. This concept is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Learner Attributes Brought to the Learning Experience
Here, in Figure 2, the design of the course allows learners to bring their personal attributes, and integrate them into the learning experience, while at the same time enabling teachers to use those learner-specific attributes to enhance productivity and performance of multiple learners. Designers engage multiple characteristics of learners so that these can be not only accounted for but, more importantly, utilized for highest levels of engagement and learning. The following discusses each of the five components we have identified to demonstrate how they need to be treated as learner-specific attributes for productive learning.
Each learner, regardless of age, brings prior knowledge to a learning environment. And while the designer can assume certain abilities (for example, the ability to read and write English), it is far less feasible to predict what a learner does, or does not know, about a specific content domain or the anticipated performance outcome and its appropriate indicators. Rather than assume specific “prior knowledge” the designer needs to permit learners to draw on their own range of experiences to enhance and enrich the entire experience.
The particular context and situation of the ‘anywhere, anytime’ learners will impact on they way they interpret and assign meaning to the resources and participants encountered in the web-based course. While it is expected that the designer will be best positioned to define the necessary content by which learners will achieve the course outcomes – who better to define the boundaries of the material to be learned - when we consider the geographically and temporally open nature of the web environment, designers are much less able to determine whether the content is relevant to the learner since they cannot know the context or situation in which that content may be applied. And they cannot know how, within that context, an application of that content will be authentic and meaningful to the learner.
Much has been written about the different learning styles and cognitive processes learners rely on, as well as how multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993) can be used to explain the individual’s approach to learning. Often instructional designers create courses that cater for the expected learning styles of the students. Our contention is that designers should not presume a method or process that best works for such varying and variable individual differences; rather learners must be able to use those preferences, and maybe develop supplemental ones, as they work towards achieving performance outcomes.
While designers in the United States or Australia may know that their pool of learners live in a certain country, it is a lost opportunity to assume a particular world view of their learners when designing instructional materials and activities. Thus designers would enable richer contributions between and among learners and instructors if they allow learners to recognize and understand their own cultural perspective, and find how it influences and advances their learning.
Finally, learners will have preferences for the presentation and utilization of learning materials and media elements (Clark & Mayer, 2003). For the same reasons given for learning styles, this preference is not something designers can predict with certainty. In many ways media preferences have been managed by providing graphics with accompanying text, videos with optional transcripts, and textual commentary and audio to support visual images. However we include this element to reinforce the point that designers should not make assumptions about which media components will best meet a learner’s needs – but rather allow the learner to draw on the best means to comprehend and internalize information.
To illustrate our position, the following case study demonstrates how these learner-specific attributes are central to using course content to meet specific concrete and abstract objectives. In addition to documenting ways in which we can change our instructional design thinking and practices, the case study also reveals methods by which we can rethink the delivery of domain-specific courses. It is important to note that the case study (which relates to a course on multicultural diversity) is presented to illustrate how learners can take a more active role in contextualizing the design; it is not presented to represent a strategy for addressing different cultures within a course environment.
A creative and engaging course in multicultural diversity should be designed to stretch students from what they ‘know’ or believe to something more exceptional that can be internalized and practiced. Focusing on what is common about the human condition is a compelling way to learn about multicultural perspectives, and demonstrates a design model that is predicated on what the learner brings to the course. The design adopted for teaching this course is geared towards achieving an outcome where learners work to improve their ability to comprehend how the social world looks to them and to those they think are different from themselves – how human human beings are and how our imperfect and limited knowledge encourages us to be unmindful of our methods and products of interaction. This can be economically and impressionably undertaken in web-based learning environments and illustrates the ways that a course can be created for the range of individual learner attributes inside the teaching and learning “space.”
The framework of this diversity course is based on the perspectives and assumptions brought to the course by learners (their Prior Knowledge, Culture and Context/Situation) within which learners impose Brown’s (1991) human universals, de Botton’s (2004) thesis about status anxiety, Hofstede’s (2001) and Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars’ (2000) universal cultural dimensions, and Berreby’s (2005) assertions about our tribal minds. As a teaching strategy this set of ideas aims to enable students to appreciate that there are universal human fears and needs, common to us all, an internalization of which can help us reduce our ignorance and resultant behaviors and attitudes toward others. When we recognize certain human universals about fears and needs, we can accept and empathize with others’ attempts to meet those needs and allay those fears, and look for patterns and means by which other people (and ourselves) do this. Thus learners can look at their own experiences that may point out their fears and needs and discern how others might perceive these in their own contexts.
To integrate some of the learner-specific attributes (PK, CS, LS/MI, C), the initial activity requires students to describe themselves. They are asked to name as many identifiers as they can think of – one or two word nouns – and then construct their own cultural “profile” through these. For instance, a female student might be a daughter, mother, sister, girlfriend, student, and employee. In so doing, students consider how they see themselves, and how they project themselves, and then how they assume others see them. Immediately, and uniformly, they recognize differences in how they believe they appear to others compared to the identifiers they hold dear. A conspicuous example is their religious identity, especially when artifacts are not displayed on their person, home, or workspace. Many students who name their devout Christianity, for example, as a strong distinction special to them are surprised to note that it is not obvious and central to another’s perception of them. From a designer’s perspective these outcomes are not always and immediately predictable, and the identifiers raised in this self-constructive process also cannot be presumed with any accuracy.
A second activity requires students to “profile” someone they barely know according to what they see and interpret through that person’s behaviors and self-presentation. They then interview the subjects of their profiles and learn how these individuals identify themselves using theoretically-defined primary, secondary, and tertiary dimensions of culture they have been exploring and defining. These are offered in a variety of media including books, web articles, and videos. Salient features or descriptors that students select and interviewees choose to reveal vary, which students note and later subject to critical scrutiny. Students become more conscious (construct knowledge) of how each of us views ourselves and how we believe we present ourselves to others. They recognize that those images are not as easily interpreted or, more significantly, understood as students thought they were. They often did not know how socially constructed their identity classifications are, nor were they cognizant of their prescribed worldviews; they explored the origins of our own collective “knowing”. Thus learners’ individual perspectives become the starting place for addressing course expectations, rather than the instructor’s or designer’s.
As students become aware of their own constructed selves, and they check their perceptions about themselves and others against the perceptions of others, new, rich raw materials surface. They use their own experiences to explain standard multicultural concepts such as privilege, stereotyping, bias, prejudice, attitudes, and behaviors. Teacher and learner, together, create a course theme that does not point out differences that ought or must be celebrated because they are inherently valuable to the human narrative, but at the core of what humans share and require.
A second set of activities also demonstrates how individual students’ culture can be capitalized on in the course environment. Students read, locate examples and explanations from multiple sources such as periodicals, movies and videos, events they take part in, and post comments and respond to others on the concept of status and the universal need to matter, be noticed, fit, have value in someone’s eyes, be loved, and be respected as Alain de Botton (2004) asserts. Learners begin with their own constructions of status and status anxiety, then discern other people’s anxieties and how those manifest themselves in behaviors and attitudes. Hofstede (2001) describes and provides evidence for five dimensions on which countries as whole entities differ that influence thinking and behavior in just the ways we expect students will absorb – those that are points of departure and preferences for dealing with the world around us, evolved through culture, that enable us to predict not only how individuals feel and act, but organizations, too. Students situate themselves in these world views and then they situate others. Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars (2000) have a similar position on culture but couch it in a more accessible manner for practical application. They compare culture-defining dimensions and how they are managed and reconciled to enable integration rather than polarization of practices and ideas. Students overwhelmingly claim they see themselves more clearly, but most significantly, realize that differences in others are no more sinister, complex, correct, inferior (or any other evaluative position) than how others perceive them. They learn to comprehend that attitudes and beliefs are at the root of behaviors, and many of these have an explainable basis. Learners, therefore, have internalized concepts, both concrete and abstract, by relying on their most efficacious ways of extracting significant material, using their own experiences to comprehend it, stretching the limits of their world views and attitudes to include new ideas and new arrangements of ideas. They demonstrate completion of course objectives by meeting performance indicators set by the instructor, but in a way that makes obvious to them how much they have learned.
Through this elaboration we have presented a case for reinventing common instructional design practices by advocating an approach where design focuses on the individual learner achieving meaningful and situated outcomes from their engagement and encounters with a course of study. As we stated earlier, through the creation of relevance being taken up by the learner rather than the teacher or designer, a more contextual and personal learning experience can be generated. To capture the essence of this concept, we will refer to this reinvention as Design for Contextual Learning.
The growth of the internet has seen a parallel rise in the utilization of web-based learning environments, where students can engage and interact with other learners and teachers in a formal learning process, regardless of their geographic location. Over recent years, designers of those environments have been proposing alternative models to account for the potential for collaboration while preferred learning theories have tended to support more interpretivist epistemologies, popularised through constructivist learning principles that focus on the meanings developed by the individual learner. In this paper we have presented an argument that instructional design for web-learning must provide learning environments to accommodate and capitalize on learner attributes brought to the course. Through an analysis of a college course, we have also demonstrated that shifts in how we create learning opportunities allow those attributes to contribute to the course and allow different, we would say improved, outcomes to emerge. More importantly this analysis reinforces the need to continually reassess the models we use and philosophies on which we depend in teaching and learning, the shifting and complementary roles of teacher and learner, and the contribution of learner attributes to the growth of knowledge within our particular domain.
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