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"the process of specifying conditions for learning" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 30)"
"the process of specifying conditions for learning" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 30)"
Before the ITMA program, I designed in two different areas of my work: as a high school Spanish teacher and as the Founder & CEO of Redshift Education, the education technology startup that builds video games for teaching the Spanish language.
As a teacher
My work as a teacher involved designing all of my own courses. I would design by creating syllabi for the year-long Spanish classes I taught at the high school level, detailing classroom expectations and my general approach to the year. I’d follow that with periodic project outline documents (“launch documents”) for each project-based learning unit in those Spanish classes to give to students a step-by-step roadmap of the scaffolded assignments and formative assessments required of them in service of a greater real-world goal.
However, spending too much attention on designing projects and units before the school year started – that is, before I met my students for the year in each class – felt silly at the time: I felt like I’d just have to redo the design anyway once I learned who my students were, what their interests were, and what their actual level of language skill and previous knowledge actually was.
As a product developer
On the other hand, historically at Redshift, scope was the consistent main problem with my past design practices as a product developer. I often was tempted to make plans that were overly ambitious for the capacity of the development team. To attempt to fix this issue, we would often make cuts in later phases (e.g., development phase) once we found out that there was something in the storyboard that would have a negative return on /investment.
Other times, my designs overestimated the language skills of the student user. In this case, sometimes we would not even realize that this was an issue in the design phase at all, and thus did not solve the problem in the design phase.
Another issue was balancing the design of the learning tasks (in-game activities) with the design of the user experience. In other words, I needed to design both what the user would be doing at each moment of the game, but also how they would know they were supposed to be doing that task at each moment of the game. The latter was a design challenge consistently because the games are in Spanish and problem-based, so there are little, if any, direct instructions in English for the user.
Now after completion of the ITMA program, my design process at Redshift includes more intentionality. I have tools to assess the needs and capabilities of the learners. I continue to brainstorm game ideas, then ultimately decide the learning goals, learning context, and performance context. I now survey or explicitly discuss with the learner(s) their needs, backgrounds, and preferences in the design phase of a project, and how they would like those answers reflected in the learning we will do together.
Recent design successes include creating an instructional design workshop with swing dance instructor Ben Donnelly in the Learning Message Design class. The workshop I created took him through the process of creating a new course for his students based on his newly acquired west coast swing knowledge and his new professional goals for himself after my evaluation of his previous swing dance course.
I have always considered learner needs, preferences, motivations, but I previously only did so because I intuitively thought it might be important to the learning process. The difference with my practice now is that this consideration of learner needs, backgrounds, and preferences is very intentional and explicit – and in cooperation with the learner, as opposed to through assumptions that I may have made about that learner subconsciously.
