“Education lies at a peculiar crossroad in society. On one hand it has the responsibility of anticipating real-life skills by preparing us for an increasingly complex world - but education methodologies can only be formalized after practices have been defined. This dichotomy is particularly aggravated when it comes to technology, where fast-paced innovation and perpetual change is the only constant (Michell Zappa, 2014).” After looking through various websites through the lens of "end-user needs," preparing for our third week of "distance learning," and developing reference materials for students and fellow colleagues, here are my thoughts about designing my website:
Ultimately, as I've considered the end-user of my work, with one particular face in mind, I've been reminded that empathy for the learner is as important, if not more important, than all of the critical details of instructional design. At the end of the day, if we don't have empathy for our learner - with individual knowledge, skills, circumstances, and goals - we may very well miss the point of our instructional design, which is to facilitate true learning within each of our students.
5 Comments
Evrim Cakir
3/30/2020 09:09:30 am
Empathy is huge right now. I teach High school kids and I wonder when they will we will be taken advantage of our empathy? My heart hurts for all of them, but at one point we have to get back on track.
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Joel
3/30/2020 10:49:13 am
Thanks for sharing Megan. "Building the boat as we sail it" couldn't have said it better myself. I feel like our Masters program has come at a super valuable time where we can implement our learned content on the spot. I too and working on how to best tackle distance learning, I have found many of the design strategies and content (ARCS and Baggio) particularly helpful when thinking about big picture curriculum design.
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Kathy Martin
3/31/2020 10:24:14 pm
I have to tell you, we are building a boat while weathering a storm. I am leading the math group that is creating the lessons that the teachers will teach. I feel as if the boat was a board when we set sail, and we hit a huge storm and still are trying to build that boat. It has created quite a bit of stress for me trying to lead this team, when I don't even have all of the necessary information to lead. All I can ask is if the teachers are respectful to those who participated in the creation of these units. It has been a rough road.
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Tracy
4/1/2020 08:14:10 pm
Wow, "Changes are happening so fast - there's not much time for development before implementation."
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Kirsten
4/10/2020 01:20:26 pm
I love how you have organized your blog this week. I feel like all our readings in this course is really going to be useful for distance learning. It is already so overwhelming switching over to this type of learning in such a fast and unexpected way. Making sure students know the end goal of lessons and keeping things simple and straight to the point will help students be successful. I completely agree with your last paragraph!
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Megan BurtonInnovative Learning Archives
June 2020
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