ELDT 6100: Foundations of Learning, Design, and Technology

Course Description: Contemporary issues and historical development of learning, design and technology. An overview of learning theory, instructional systems analysis and design, instructional design models, technology innovations, and factors affecting the use of technology for learning.

This is the first class most students take in the program, as it is an introduction to this field. It begins by going over the history of instructional design and educational technology, then proceeds through several learning theories and an overview of instructional design in different settings.

Here you can see some of the content I created in this class:

1. One of our first assignments was to write a short paper discussing our personal definitions of learning, design, and technology. This was an interesting assignment because I would have guessed that there was only one definition for these terms, but I was wrong. Here is the spoiler, for those who don’t have time to read the whole thing: to me, instructional design is the systematic planning, implementation, and evaluation of teaching and learning using technology, experience, and ethical considerations as appropriate.

2. This was an infographic we were asked to make illustrating the instructional design process. I made it in Easelly, which was fairly easy to pick up and use. This is a huge pro for me, because it means I can ask students to use it as well without too much of a learning curve.

3. I created the following chart because I was interested in exploring the differences between pedagogy and andragogy, the latter of which was a new term to me. I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable using the word “pedagogy” to refer to the teaching of my students, who are adults, but I was unaware that there was a more accurate term out there! In this unit I learned a lot about what considerations to make while teaching adult learners.

4. Early in the course we created a timeline of the field of Learning, Design, and Technology with a focus on a topic that we chose. I decided to focus on how trends in the field change over time, such that the field began by focusing on the promise of visual education, then transitioned into military education, and so forth. I liked the freedom of choice in this assignment, and I learned more than I thought I would by creating the timeline. Before this assignment, I would have said that timelines were primarily a good assignment for history classes, but I can see now how timelines can be useful in many subjects.

5. The primary project is this course is an application project designed to help us demonstrate what we have learned all semester. For my application project, I designed a tutorial to teach students how to find the holding of a Supreme Court case, which is an important skill necessary for writing a case brief. The learning objective that the tutorial helps students achieve is: Given the text of a Supreme Court case, students will be able to correctly identify the holding of that case 8 times out of 10.

Click here to see the tutorial. It was my first time working with Articulate Storyline, so it is a simple tutorial. I chose to walk students through the steps of finding the holding using screenshots because I like being able to examine each step of a process for as long as I want, and I think screenshots are easier to flip through to find a specific step than a video. However, one improvement I would make to this tutorial would be to add a video of me going through the steps, for the students who prefer learning from a video. One thing that I really liked about Articulate Storyline is that I could add knowledge checks directly into the tutorial, and there were several options for that.