Kate's Take

      It's no secret that instructional design and learning technology are here to stay.  These ideas that come up week after week in our R-511 course keep us constantly on our toes as the industry, and the definitions that come with it, shift.  Joshua Kim has several articles this week for our reading, but the last article I think sums up the current situation with Learning and Technology.  In his article, "Career Opportunities at the Intersection of Learning and Technology: A talent shortage?" Kim shares the large number of Instructional Design positions open at the time of his job search (2018).       Kim indicates that he believes that the number of jobs available is not a fluke, and that instructional designers needed will continue to be in demand with fewer skilled people available than are needed.  This puts those of us working to learn instructional design and learning technologies in a great position to not only have a vari...

      Tonight in R-511, Dr. Tiffany Roman, an Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University mentioned that her school recently began an undergraduate degree in learning design and technology.  This made me think of the article from Ritzhaupt and Kang, "Are we ready for bachelor's degrees in educational technology?" (2015).  Through their study, experts in the field were surveyed and largely agreed that a bachelor's degree in educational technology would be appropriate as a 4 year degree, and the majority agreed that the course should be a combination of face to face and online learning.  This blended approach was appealing to more than 70% of participants, but less than 45% would recommend either a full in person course or a completely online course.      Experts agree that there should be some pre-requisite knowledge such as computer skills, psychology, and composition, but that some other courses, such as Economics and Calculus would not...

     How (un)ethical are you?  Most people would claim that they are very ethical, including me.  Banaji, Bazerman, and Chugh took on this hot topic with discussing how most people FEEL that they are very ethical, but when actual data is collected and analyzed, it is clear that there are biases even among the most aware people.       There are a couple of types of bias that are common - bias toward people who are similar to oneself, bias toward people who are popular or well liked, and bias toward people who are in a position to give the person in power something he or she wants.  If we accept that bias is happening, and acknowledge it's existence, what can we do about it?       In the Banaji, Bazerman, and Chugh study, they encouraged organizations to look at their structure, and trends in who is in positions of power (race, gender, etc) and also the make up of the majority of people in those positions.  Then, t...

 Because I'm in Dr. Bonk's R678 course, I'm currently taking my first MOOC.  When I started this program, I hadn't ever heard the term - probably because the huge technology boom in education has really taken place during the time that I was out of the field and raising my kids, or perhaps because my focus has been 5-12 education.  I did a quick survey on social media to see what my friends knew about MOOCs and only those in the graduate education arena were familiar with them.  I find the concept fascinating, and decided to take a MOOC, "The Science of Well Being," partially because I wanted to get happier as the course promises, and partially because it was a Yale course and that was ridiculously appealing to my ego.   The chapter in Bonk, Lee, Reeves, and Reynold's book, "Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology," focuses on design of MOOCs and one particular section of the chapter was especially interesting to me.  This focuse...

 I selected "The Checklist" to read this week simply because it was published in The New Yorker.  As an undergrad, one of my English professors loved The New Yorker and we often read articles from it's pages.  Reading this article gave me a sense of nostalgia - there's something comforting about the familiar way that these articles are written.  The topic, as usual, was fascinating to me.  It discussed how using a checklist could improve outcomes for patients in ICU units in hospitals.   Gawande introduced Pronovost, a gentleman with both a PhD and an MD that introduced this idea and did research to support it.  By using the checklist, doctors, and especially nurses, could keep track of different points of patient care.  Not only this, but they were EACH encouraged to create a checklist in one study, that identified gaps in the procedures of some and allowed a master checklist to be developed with best practices in mind to give patients the b...

 I love learning.  I've always been one who is curious about new things - I'd read the cereal box at breakfast, and share my "facts" with my parents.  Now that I have kids of my own, I have one that is the same way  - continuously trying to impress everyone around him with the tidbits of knowledge that he has discovered along the way.   This week, I read an article by Martinez and Whiting on designing informal learning environments.  The chart in the article really caught my eye - suggesting education is a continuum of formal and informal and that blogs, social media, podcasts are the most informal of learning, primarily because they focus on learner CHOICE.  This is so important with learners today - kids love the option to view short videos or read short snippets on what they care about.   In the article, they reference museums and how learning there is often informal.  I LOVE museums and remember being frustrated as a child becau...

 I'm in a unique position this semester to be enrolled in TWO courses with Dr. Bonk, and I was entertained and delighted to read the preface written by Dr. Bonk and Dr. Wiley, "Reflections on the Waves of Emerging Learning Technology."  After spending two nights a week with Dr. Bonk in class (virtually) for the past 9 weeks, I can imagine his surprise when students began asking about the topic of learning objects.  I can also see him seeking out the professor that the students in his course credited as being an expert, and him collaborating with him, and in turn, becoming an expert himself in the field.   We've spent a lot of time looking at Open Educational Resources in both of his courses, and my perception of "free" has shifted from thinking that if it was free, it must be low quality, to recognizing that if it is valuable, it needs to be accessible and that our responsibility is larger than just a small audience who can/will/could pay for a text book.  ...

 Over the past few years, all students in the US and throughout most of the world have had experience learning in a virtual environment they were unfamiliar with previously.  Though this was new to most K12 students, this wasn't a new concept, and distance learning has been around for years, first with mail order options for learners, and now with Zoom and other virtual environments.   In 1995, Wagner and McCombs wrote a paper, "Learner Centered Psychological Principles in Practice: Designs for Distance Education," encouraging ALL instructors to use the tools that many distance learning instructors used to increase student engagement in their courses.  They noted that it was common belief that learner-centered instruction was necessary for distance education and that the tools and best practices related to it were used primarily in that arena.   Many of the learning principles noted in this article stood the test of time and become essential during the...