1-1 Approach of this Course

Designing for Change

The goal of this course is to develop a set of skills and insights that will empower you to design for audiences and tools not yet invented. You’ll build on your problem-solving skills and use the web as a powerful tool for keeping up to date with both the available technologies and their best-practice applications. This course doesn’t undertake to teach you to master specific software tools, although you will see many examples and learn how to evaluate which tools you might want to use. This course aims to grow your creativity and awareness of analysis and design issues so that your knowledge and skills as an e-learning professional will continually evolve even as the technological elements inevitably change.

Designing for Various Outcomes and Purposes

There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for designing e-learning environments. As you’ll soon discover by looking at actual e-learning environments, different purposes require different approaches. Some require sophisticated multimedia and animated simulations, while others are best served by text-based case studies. Some purposes require individual work towards mastery; others are best with group collaboration and reflective interaction. Some goals require active facilitation by an instructor, while others are best suited to self-paced independent work. E-learning is flexible enough that it can be appropriate in many circumstances – as long as it’s thoughtfully designed.

Designing for Various Industries or Institutions

Designing for business and industry may seem very different from designing for higher education. Your initial reaction might be “I work in the training department for a bank. What do I care about the issues of designing for a college-level philosophy class?” Or, “I’ll be designing an online degree program—training modules for industry are irrelevant to me.” However different these scenarios seem, there’s a great deal of opportunity for productive cross-fertilization. Tools and tactics that are first “discovered” by industry for a specific set of purposes can suggest amazing possibilities to a college instructor facing a different set of challenges. Conversely, as the private sector’s demand for soft-skills training and conceptual education accelerates, corporate trainers will depend more on the learning tactics deployed in the best of the online sociology or philosophy classes. Your best work as a learning-environment designer will come as you are able to cross boundaries to choose the best options for your context.

Designing for Successful Practice

Whether in business and industry or in education, front runners have already learned to handle many of the issues you will be struggling with. One of your most useful strategies will be to identify some of the pioneers in cutting-edge e-learning in your field. Look at the instruction they’re currently delivering to determine what is working, and read their published discussions of pedagogy and practice.