Fall 2022
Introduction to Instructional Design
Stacie Cassat Green MEd, Principal, 64 Crayons - Denise M. Snyder ALM, Director of Learning Design and Digital Innovation, Union College
Behind every good learning tool be it a website, application, webinar, online course, workshop, or interactive museum exhibit is the work of an instructional designer. Instructional design is a creative process that uses learning theories and frameworks, project planning, content expertise, communication, writing, and technology to architect experiences for today's learners. The best instructional designers are agile and adaptable; they can quickly synthesize unfamiliar content, evaluate new technologies, and develop learning solutions that best meet the needs of a diverse audience. In this course, students work together to produce learning experiences using today's media and technologies. The gap between theory and practice is an issue in many fields. By using a project-based approach, we work to close that gap by learning about instructional design theories and frameworks while developing a series of products; students submit a project every two weeks. This course is helpful for those professionals who work directly or indirectly to support and improve learning in their organizations, or those lifelong learners who want to better understand how to use technology to manage their own learning.
Spring 2023
Introduction to Instructional Design
Stacie Cassat Green MEd, Principal, 64 Crayons
Behind every good learning tool be it a website, application, webinar, online course, workshop, or interactive museum exhibit is the work of an instructional designer. Instructional design is a creative process that uses learning theories and frameworks, project planning, content expertise, communication, writing, and technology to architect experiences for today's learners. The best instructional designers are agile and adaptable; they can quickly synthesize unfamiliar content, evaluate new technologies, and develop learning solutions that best meet the needs of a diverse audience. In this course, students work together to produce learning experiences using today's media and technologies. The gap between theory and practice is an issue in many fields. By using a project-based approach, we work to close that gap by learning about instructional design theories and frameworks while developing a series of products; students submit a project every two weeks. This course is helpful for those professionals who work directly or indirectly to support and improve learning in their organizations, or those lifelong learners who want to better understand how to use technology to manage their own learning.
Spring 2023
Introduction to Instructional Design: The Art and Science of Building Knowledge
Valerie Mann EdD, EdD, Associate Professor, College Success, Johnson County Community College
In this course, students learn application skills melding the best of learning strategies, learning theory, and mind-brain education research. This course is intended to provide managers, trainers, learning designers, and teachers with skills to manage their instructional design and teaching tools while infusing learning strategies to maximize knowledge for varied types of learning preferences and needs. With practical application at the fore, students engage with current research, strategies for effective learning, and design principles to explore how these concepts can be applied to help learners achieve their best in the classroom and workplace, both face to face and online.
Spring 2023
Applied Learning Design
Stacie Cassat Green MEd, Principal, 64 Crayons
In this course, students use a design thinking methodology to design and develop an authentic learning product or experience. Each student prepares a product, such as a course or workshop, social learning community, website, or software application. Using rapid prototyping, students present several iterations of their designs to the class, participate in peer critiques, and continually improve their products over the semester. As instructional designers work in a team, each student contributes to, and benefits from, a class consulting bank. They use their skills to help others and to gain currency that they can exchange for help on their own projects. Students also explore additional instructional design frameworks and learning theories to improve fluency and flexible thinking in the field. Students may not take both EDUC E-113 and DGMD E-60 for degree or certificate credit.
Prerequisites: DGMD E-55, EDUC E-103, EDUC E-111, or the equivalent.
Fall 2022
Adult Learning Theories
Cindy Joyce MA, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Pillar Search and Human Resources Consulting
Learning opportunities for adults are often modeled after our classes in grade school and high school. However, adults learn much differently from children, and their motivation to learn is vastly different as well. This course explores adult learning theory and how to apply those theories in a practical manner, engage the adult learner, and provide learning opportunities that both motivate and challenge. This course is taught using a combination of learning methods including course discussion, case studies, reading, group activities, and guest speakers with experience working with adult learners.
Prerequisites: Educational or work experience in education, teaching, organizational behavior, human resources, training, or instructional design.
Spring 2023
Ludic Learning: Designing Playful Learning Experiences
Adeeb Syed MEd, Technical Instructional Designer, Springboard
Gaming is poised to become the dominant form of media in the twenty-first century, overtaking the film, television, and music industries. Unsurprisingly, there has been a newfound respect and increased enthusiasm for educational games. However, the curious problem with much of the academic discourse around educational games is that they are still viewed as mere content-delivery mechanisms from the lens of formal schooling environments. On the other hand, the corporate-technology world is also having a profound influence on the discourse of educational games with newly coined buzzwords such as gamification permeating through all sorts of informal learning environments. To make matters worse, there has been a constellation of new and emerging technologies that are constantly shifting what it means to learn. What is most curious, however, is that while modern schools have only been around for a few hundred years and various forms of digital edutainment for even less, games and play are thousands of years old. If we instead shift our mindset to understanding games and play as a sort of natural literacy as tools for thinking, discovery, reflection, and expression we might better understand how to design educational games in the twenty-first century. Instead of calling them video games, we consider how gaming technologies afford new possibilities for representing learning. To take full advantage of these affordances, we embark on thoughtful critiques of traditional ideas of learning that come from formal environments and also parse through some of the outlandish claims of tech companies. We explore alternative pedagogies, alternative ways of measurement, and the best lessons learned from informal learning environments. At the same time, all these alternatives are still very much steeped in research-backed findings from the learning sciences. While we explore much of the research in the learning sciences, this course is less interested in debating the particulars of the research findings and more interested in distilling and creatively translating these findings into playful design in a variety of learning contexts.