Reflection what you learned from this class about design processes and how applies to your real-life experiences
What were some important takeaways or aha moments?
What are you still grappling with or confused about?
Beiheng
At the beginning of this semester, I got lost in our project. I have lots of material from NY Sunworks need to read, and I don't know how to get started. After reading more class content, I think the essential thing for redesign a learning environment is to identify the pain points of the previous design and try to make the new design user-centered. We tried to reduce both teachers' and trainers' workload and making the learning environment easier to access. I think the design model helped me to get started, and our team collaboration is pretty good. We have a weekly discussion for the ongoing millstones and Trello board (slack channel)to plan for the future. I'm enjoying seeing learners are satisfied with our designs. The biggest challenge that I'm still experiencing is memorizing cognitive and learning theories. Some theories are related, and sometimes they could confuse me a lot.
Bihan
I really learned a ton from redesigning this project. It's a process of applying what we learned from cognitive science and learning science to solve real-life problem. We, as instructional designers, have to be learner-centric, putting ourselves in the learners' shoes, understand what they do, their needs, and their goals, empathize with them and understand things from their perspective. We also need to be flexible and open-minded because things don't always go as planned. We need to keep our minds open during conversations, accepting suggestions, and thinking differently about our own work. We want to meld minds with subject matter experts (Hannah and Kristen) and team members in order to come up with new and better ideas. Taking this class and completing this project really helped me better understand this field - instructional design, usability, communications and new technologies. Now I know the capabilities of lots of different eLearning development tools and software. I aim to never stop learning and always be on the lookout for new ways to create, use, and manage technology.
Samantha
It took a bit for us to get in the groove of this assignment, but once we focused more on what we felt our learners needed, and less on what NY Sun Works was requesting of us, everything started to make sense. Having the milestones each week was definitely helpful in keeping us on track. I think one of our biggest strengths was communication. We had weekly Zoom meetings, regular Slack conversations, and a lot of notes and comments in our milestone documents. We struggled at first with using our to-do list as intended, but that changed for us during sprint week. I regret that our final piece isn't quite what we were hoping for, as far as functionality goes, because the available platforms didn't quite match up with our vision and needs. However, we are able to get our ideas across to our classmates and stakeholder, so that was reassuring. I definitely feel that this was an incredibly helpful experience that I'll be able to bring into the real world once I start interning and eventually get a job in the industry. I'm very grateful for that!
Sondra
Process is everything when it comes to working in a team! At first, I was overwhelmed by the amount of learning science theories and strategies, and numerous diagrams. Now, here we are, at the end of the Design Process journey, and it (almost) makes sense now. If you don't plan, strategize, and organize before starting a project, you will fall victim to a hurricane of ideas, materials, and readings. I'm so glad that we took the time to organize our shared Google drive into clearly-defined folders, an alphabetized reference document, and consistently communicated who was responsible for which task on Slack and Trello. On the other hand, I wish we had learned about Logic Models before the design phases. No matter how organized we were digitally and physically, there were so many ideas that needed to be corralled into one coherent space - aka, the Logic Model. I remember thinking, "How the heck are we going to define the Outcomes or Effects for NYSW? If they don't specify it, how are we supposed to do it?" Well, the answers were always there, sitting in that huge pile of information on our laptops, waiting to be extrapolated by us. We just needed to stop worrying about that scary, gigantic forest and focus our sights on the trees right in front of us.