I am an instructional designer working for a digital education company. I am not a teacher able to implement a networked learning method into my curriculum as a means of substitution.
My context has forced me to think hard about an approach to this assignment, as I would like to embrace the concept of NGL, but am not in a place to use it directly. Often, my deep thought is initiated by frustration. Frustration brought on my what I assume is practical, but others don't. I spend time trying to figure out how I can achieve the result I want when I don't always have the decision-making authority to have it done directly. It is this kind of situation that has helped me realise the problem I'd like to tackle.
The opportunities to connect with, construct, deconstruct and reconstruct relevant knowledge are countless with NGL. However, I have a feeling that NGL-based courses may fall at the first hurdle too frequently if the instructional designers developing them are not given the basic blueprint for effective design.
If NGL-based courses aren’t designed effectively my fear is that the students undertaking them will be disadvantaged on multiple fronts:
In an instructor-less online course responsibility for student learning, experience and understanding lies with instructional designers and educational developers, however, this too poses a range of problems:
There currently is no universal blueprint. So, using the literature I've been uncovering and the feedback I receive I'd like to create one.
From this problem statement I hope to build some solid research questions, explore their solutions and hopefully construct a blueprint which could be used to design any NGL course.
Alex
My context has forced me to think hard about an approach to this assignment, as I would like to embrace the concept of NGL, but am not in a place to use it directly. Often, my deep thought is initiated by frustration. Frustration brought on my what I assume is practical, but others don't. I spend time trying to figure out how I can achieve the result I want when I don't always have the decision-making authority to have it done directly. It is this kind of situation that has helped me realise the problem I'd like to tackle.
The opportunities to connect with, construct, deconstruct and reconstruct relevant knowledge are countless with NGL. However, I have a feeling that NGL-based courses may fall at the first hurdle too frequently if the instructional designers developing them are not given the basic blueprint for effective design.
If NGL-based courses aren’t designed effectively my fear is that the students undertaking them will be disadvantaged on multiple fronts:
- They won’t understand what NGL is.
- Students won’t be able to apply or use NGL successfully.
- They will be turned off the concept.
- Limited or no learning will take place.
In an instructor-less online course responsibility for student learning, experience and understanding lies with instructional designers and educational developers, however, this too poses a range of problems:
- Instructional design as a term is ill-defined and instructional designers don’t all understand what their roles entail. Many of my contemporaries are content cut and pasters, as opposed to conceivers of effective educational flow. Therefore, much of what is produced by these instructional designers isn’t planned using relevant psychological application, but is instead developed using content clustering, based on client expectations. To them, design is a storyboard outlining how the content will be displayed in a digital course.
- There is a misconception about what NGL is by instructional designers who haven’t acquired a specific understanding. Basically, amongst this cohort there is a big assumption that online learning is connected learning, which consists of links to other sources. NGL is more than the use of blogs, twitter, and Feedly within existing learning environments. These are reasonable tools for working toward NGL principles and goals, however, simply using those tools doesn’t mean you’re engaged in NGL (Jones 2015).
- There is a mis-assumption of the skills a digital learner possesses when undertaking an online course. Technology has become a necessary part of daily life for the overwhelming majority of humans. As such, a theory exists that we fit one of two categories; digital natives, or digital immigrants. This categorisation is largely based on generational association, which is essentially determined by ones age. Unfortunately, it is often assumed that those born into the digital age understand technology in a deeper manner than those who weren’t. The result being that the use and purpose of many technological applications are not clarified before an online course commences.
- Many instructional designers are unfamiliar with contemporary technological literacy and how it can be used. Relating back to the poorly understood purpose of instructional design, many in these roles are used to playing with content and placing it nicely on a screen. The monotony of these tasks establishes a false comprehension of technological literacy, as it mostly focusses on designing education using simple modality, basic technology and bright imagery. Notwithstanding the importance of these elements, instructional designers who have not fully experienced NGL are at great risk of not applying it effectively due to their lack of comprehension.
There currently is no universal blueprint. So, using the literature I've been uncovering and the feedback I receive I'd like to create one.
From this problem statement I hope to build some solid research questions, explore their solutions and hopefully construct a blueprint which could be used to design any NGL course.
Alex