Insights

• Learning AND Learners - We design for both the learners themselves and the processes of learning. In my design experience thus far, I've found that I tend to first design for the learning: the expectations, assumptions, and predictions I have about the processes, results, and outcomes of learning in my environment. The practice of conjecture mapping (Sandoval, 2014) helps elucidate this. Then, during the testing phase when I can observe the learner engaging with the design, I may end up changing my design to be more about or for the learner, and not just the learning.

  • An example from the Stress Management project: Designing the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly sections of the journal to have just the right prompts and questions addresses the processes of learning, because this is how we could ensure students will write about stress as a way to recognize it and fight it. Observing the students cross out certain prompts that were not helpful to them or re-naming them to suit their needs addresses how the design can be tailored for the learners themselves.

• Striking a balance - The design process is often a constant battle of coming up with cool, fun ideas that we think learners would love, but then having to not only connect those ideas to a learning goal, but also justify them using learning sciences literature. Designing for learning and learners means attempting to strike a balance between these two sides as effectively as possible, without making too many compromises.

  • An example from the Club Health Game project: I would consider the Club Health game to be a "serious" game (Gee, 2009). The content is supposed to relate closely to the learners' personal health journeys and tie into their community’s health. We would hope that the decision-making skills they learn from the game would carry forward into their real life. That being said, we tried to keep the game fun by simplifying these serious concepts, but without undermining their value. When designing for learning, it's important to consider how to maintain the academic integrity of the content while also keeping it engaging and fun.

• Research Methods - Designing for learning and learners requires becoming thoroughly acquainted with the context, venue, and audience of the design project. After all, this contextual information greatly informs not only the ideas a designer comes up with, but how the designer puts those ideas into action. There are several different methods relevant to learning engineering through which the designer can actively conduct research and collect data that can help inform and justify elements of the design:

  • Cognitive Task Analysis - talking to experts to understand what successful, consistent performance looks like for a task that is to be learned

  • Discourse Analysis - studying language-in-use, or the connections among saying (information) + doing (action) + being (identity) in discourse, which can help designers examine how learners make sense of something on their own and how different learners present knowledge

  • Theory of Change - developing a hypothesis about how change happens in the learning environment; particularly helpful before designing and testing, so the designer can make assumptions clear and adjust them after testing

    • An example from the Digital Portfolio project: I developed a theory of change during the design phase as away to understand change processes occurring at the individual learner level. It forced me to make logical connections between the digital portfolio/its scaffolding and how that resource would actually lead to positive change for a learner.

• Entryways - A learning environment can establish several ways to draw learners in to engage with the activities of the environment ("entryways") as well as establish ways for learners to remain engaged during the activities ("trajectories"). They are essentially invitations to engage (Kolodner et al., 2017), and they are important to make explicit in a design because they help ensure motivation is at the right level for learning to occur. As a designer, I want learners to want to engage with my design, not because others expect them to or because they are being told to. In other words, entryways should stoke intrinsic motivation.

• An example from the Stress Management project: Because stress is a very personal, emotional experience, it was of the utmost importance that students were supported in any of the ways they might choose to engage with the journal (writing in it any time of day, skipping days, crossing out and re-naming prompts, etc.). There were no expectations that the student would share their reflections with anyone else, so their choices regarding how to engage with the journal were not inherently externally influenced or controlled, other than any limits that the prompts or physical pages within the journal may have imposed.

• Funds of Knowledge & Cueing Forms - A designer can make a learning environment more inviting and engaging by taking advantage of what learners know and are capable of, instead of operating with a deficit mindset (i.e., what they do not know or cannot do). With this frame of mind, a designer:

  • Considers the learners as people with experiences, and sees them as "whole" people

  • Values learners' skills, backgrounds, interests, strengths, and perspectives

  • Builds personal authenticity for learners by designing activities that activate, take advantage of, and/or connect learners' diverse backgrounds - their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) - to the content being introduced

    • This could also mean capitalizing on cueing forms, or existing cultural forms (Horn, 2018), to both invite learners in and activate their prior knowledge. A cueing form grounds the learning activity in the familiar while at the same time opening up the learner to novel learning experiences.

      • An example from the Dance Dance Computation project: We leveraged students' cultural familiarity with how sports/dance competitions work as well as their prior knowledge of word problems and logic puzzles as a way ground the novel coding activity.

• Capitalizing on funds of knowledge and cueing forms carries the additional benefit of enhancing a learner's feeling of belonging in that learning setting. A sense of belonging has a powerful effect on learning because it can keep learners engaged and situate the learning for them in a larger community of purpose. This eliminates potential distractions from learning, like feeling alienated. In terms of fostering intrinsic motivation, fostering belonging satisfies the core human need of relatedness, according to Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2002). When this need is met, motivation develops from a more internalized locus and therefore is more likely to be sustained.

Internal: What's Happening in the Learner's Mind

• Conceptual Change & Undoing Misconceptions - According to Piaget's theory of constructivism, accommodation occurs when a learner restructures existing schema (mental models) to provide better explanations for new knowledge or experiences that better fit reality. Accommodation is where conceptual change happens, meaning a change in knowledge structures. From the outset, it seems like it would be difficult for a designer to control how and when this process occurs for learners. In the research phase of getting to know the learner population, however, a designer should be aware of the learners' basic orientation toward information, including any misconceptions or reasoning biases that exist. If a designer knows the points of confusion, then they can think about how to address them and how to design for revealing misconceptions. This may include intentionally presenting strong alternatives in the instruction that compete with learners' original ideas, or establishing learning objectives that help ensure learners reach correct conclusions. In terms of supporting mental model building, focusing on undoing misconceptions will make learners less likely to "explain away" things that don't confirm their beliefs or hypotheses, and they will be more likely to engage in the process of considering alternatives that may then lead to accommodation.

  • An example from the Hamburger Paragraph Tangibles project: For this audience of 1st and 2nd graders in particular, it will be important for the learning activities to account for some misconceptions or common mistakes that novices might make while writing on their own without the help of a visual or tangible learning aid: like "overstuffing" the burger with too much content, and not knowing when to stop; or forgetting to transition from topic sentence to detail sentences (don't want more bun than fillings!). By allowing learners to encounter misconceptions and work through them, the design will also help learners encode and internalize the important lesson of keeping their writing organized.

External: What's Happening Outside the Learner's Mind

• Constructionism & Making - Papert's theory of constructionism is about learners continuing to construct mental models of the world by building on what they already know. One way to do this is by physically making tangible objects, prototypes, and models. Making a physical object is a way for a learner to better understand concepts because they will produce a physical representative example of that concept and will be able to negotiate it in an embodied way. The embodied cognition associated with the experience of making something helps the learner encode new information to build on, update, and strengthen their mental models. The visual aspect of a making experience includes detecting patterns that lead to the discovery of structure and new interpretations, which again, can update or strengthen one's mental models.

  • An example from the Tangible & Embodied Learning Technology Module: To experience first-hand the affordances of making, my class did a design activity where we each made art using a paper circuit kit that included copper tape, coin batteries, LED lights, and paper templates. Before this activity, the concept of parallel circuits was pretty abstract to me; through the process of building my particular design, the concept became more realistic and concrete for me, thereby strengthening my mental model of circuits.

• Constructionism & Problem-Based Learning - Another way to support students in building mental models is by having them construct knowledge through discovery learning, exemplified by the problem-based learning pedagogy: where the learners construct their understanding of a topic through solving an open-ended problem related to the topic. In designing a problem-based learning environment, a designer should aim to:

  • Create a context of sustained inquiry - the learner will build more knowledge when the problem has more than just a one-shot factual answer

  • Establish clear goals and steps for moving forward - the learner will appreciate why the content is important

  • Stoke curiosity - the learner will spend energy and resources to learn answers if they are truly curious and interested

  • Develop a classroom culture where trial-and-error is okay - productive struggle can lead to better transfer and preparation for future learning

• Inviting through technology - Certain technology, like AR and VR, can be especially inviting and intriguing because it seems novel, "cool," and a little bit flashy. And these qualities can actually be good for learning in several ways -

  • • The novelty makes the learner feel excited to engage with the tech

    • The "cool" experience is so memorable that it helps the learner encode information

    • The visuals are intense so it's easy to re-experience and recall information

    • More senses are involved in the experience (i.e., embodied cognition)

  • Nonetheless, it is important for a designer to use technology wisely, especially when using it predominantly as an invitation to a learning experience. If the tech ends up functioning merely as a "flashy hook," or even a distraction, then it's less likely that it will actually support the achievement of learning objectives. In a similar vein, a certain kind of technology could be so novel, cool, or otherwise appealing that a designer wants to incorporate it for solely that sake. However, it's important for a designer to consider the affordances of the tech for learning, and therefore make an informed choice to use it.

  • Another aspect of technology to consider before deciding to use it for learning is the amount of overhead associated with using it. Do the learners have to learn how to use it first, and then use it for learning purposes? Or do they already know how to use it, and can jump right into the learning of the content?

    • • An example from the Dance Dance Computation project: We introduce block-based coding with Scratch in our learning activity. While Scratch has many affordances for introducing coding to novices (i.e., the fact that it is block-based and not text-based syntax), we noticed that it still didn't provide a level of scaffolding or guidance for a novice to feel comfortable enough to jump right into a new activity like coding. Especially for learners who already have low self-efficacy in anything STEM-related, having to learn coding in order to solve the dance competition challenge can seem daunting and not very inviting. So we added scaffolding in the form of an agent who gives feedback and hints.

• Engaging with technology - A learner's experience of engaging with the technology can happen on different levels, which a designer should consider and be able to pinpoint. Some questions a designer can ask to ensure they understand the relationship between the tech and the learner include -

  • • Is the tech specifically for some sort of learning objective? In other words, does it directly contribute to learning or affords effective learning?

    • Does the tech serve as the learning environment itself? For example, a MOOC is tech that is the environment; the online course platform is the tech that presents the content that people learn.

    • Is the tech there to make sure the challenge is at the right level? For example, even something as simple as a calculator is an example of distributed cognition between the tech and the learner. In this way, tech can be a tool that reduces cognitive load and helps the learner focus on what is important.

• Accomplishing with and through technology - Learning happens when a learner carries out a task (even if that task is just listening to an instructor). So a designer needs to consider what type of task the learner is looking to accomplish with and/or through the tech in the learning environment. For example, the Club Health Game and the Dance Dance Computation activity were all about tackling objectives in a goal-driven space, where the learning occurs through solving problems. Whereas the AR/VR Study Abroad experience and the Hamburger Paragraph Tangibles are about engaging in embodied experiences that lead to learning about concepts.

• Keeping Challenge at the Right Level - Understanding the learner population's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) helps the designer assess how much scaffolding, or guidance and support, to build into the design. Designing a learning activity with respect to the learners' ZPD helps prepare the learners for eventual independence while providing support in the moment because the activity would otherwise be too hard to do independently. When assessing how much guidance to provide through scaffolds, the designer should consider what type of learning is prioritized for the particular context: a quick rate of learning, or long-term retention and transfer? Would it be best achieved through direct instruction, or through a discovery learning approach? Answering these questions can tell the designer whether the support learners receive during the experience will actually help them operate within their ZPD.

  • An example from the Digital Portfolio project: Scaffolding can help the learner internalize parts of the process or experience that is being learned. In the digital portfolio environment, students follow a sequenced reflection process (Looking Back, Analyzing, Looking Forward) with prompts for writing. Through repeated engagement with the reflective writing process, I conjecture that students will strengthen their mental model of the reflection process, and will eventually internalize it, making it possible to practice repeatedly during the applied science project, and later, beyond school. This is especially helpful for students who don't engage in their own reflective process already.

• Metacognition & Transfer - Metacognition refers to monitoring, reflecting upon, and improving strategies for learning and problem solving. According to Bransford and Schwartz (1999), metacognition can increase transfer, which is when learners apply what they have learned to a new situation or context. Learners who actively monitor their levels of understanding are more likely to take active steps to improve their learning.

  • An example from the Stress Management project: The aim of the journal is to help students monitor, reflect upon, and discover strategies for their experiences with stress at college. It is intentionally very metacognitive, because our long-term learning outcome is for students to transfer positive stress management strategies into their post-graduate lives. As a more short-term learning outcome, we structured our Daily Reflection prompts to ensure learners were actively monitoring their levels of understanding of things they experienced during the day. For example, we included a prompt that asks about what the student learned that day, as a way for them to self-monitor their understanding of something going on in their life - whether it was something they learned in class, about a relationship, about current events, etc. Reflecting on “lived experiences” like this becomes a powerful resource for “knowing with" (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999).

• Another example is employing metacognition to teach 21st century skills, like critical thinking, scientific thinking, and domain-based thinking. These are not skills that can be "taught," per se, though the ability to think critically can be brought on by metacognition. An instructor can make this happen by labeling metacognitive and critical thinking strategies when they arise during a learning activity (i.e., "consider both sides of an issue"). Taking it a step further, the instructor should also model how the strategy can be applied in various contexts and within the domain content. Ideally, the learner will be able to identify critical thinking strategies that would otherwise be abstract, and will be able to go on to do things that benefit learning, like recognizing the deep structure of a problem vs. only the surface structure.

• Informative Feedback for Continuous Growth - A learning engineer is a sense-maker, a synthesizer, and a critiquer in addition to being a designer. Critique, peer review, and feedback have all played a key role in my development into a learning engineer, so I understand first-hand how informative feedback can support learning objectives. A designer should look to incorporate some sort of feedback mechanism into a learning design - whether from a digital agent in a computer program or in-person from an instructor - because providing feedback gives learners the impetus to iterate, improve, and make incremental adjustments. On a higher level, feedback can also cultivate a growth mindset, where the learner sees feedback as an opportunity for growth rather than as something they are doing wrong. Some things a designer should consider:

• • Make it visible - feedback is about seeing the outcomes and effects of what you did and comparing it to desired goal or outcome

  • Constructive criticism is more helpful than solely positive feedback in the long run (better for improvement)

Overall, supporting learning objectives means establishing a learning environment that provides a trajectory for continued learning and deeper involvement, where learners have knowledge that is built upon and deeply understood, not just inert.

• While "authenticity" in a learning environment can mean personal meaningfulness, I have been most intrigued by and involved in design work for authentic learning experiences that connect the classroom (for me, university classrooms) to the outside world and has learners thinking and doing in ways that reflect the practices of experts (Shaffer and Resnick, 1999).

• Applied Learning: Connecting to the Real World - Applied learning pedagogies include service-learning, internships, practica, study abroad, and undergraduate research. Most likely you will see students engaging in these types of learning experiences in secondary and post-secondary education. In an applied learning environment, learners take academic disciplinary knowledge and apply it to a real-world context or situation. A simple and popular example is evident in the phrase "engineering is applied physics" - a student with an academic background in physics gets to apply that disciplinary knowledge when working to solve an engineering challenge, like developing technology to provide access to clean water.

  • What transforms applied learning into truly experiential learning is the key ingredient of reflection. In an experiential learning situation, a student is not simply "doing" an applied learning experience, but is learning through reflection on doing. Learning does not happen through an experience alone, but rather as a result of thinking about and reflecting on it (Ash & Clayton, 2009).

    • An example from the Digital Portfolio project: The digital portfolio itself serves as a place for learners to document their experiences in applied learning, while the scaffolded reflective writing process guides the learner through critical reflection that helps them articulate the details of what they have learned from experience and how it is contributing to their whole-person development (beyond just their identity as a college student).

• Landscapes of Practice: Doing and Thinking Like the Experts - Authenticity is at play any time a learner bridges the gap between academic and workplace contexts. Similar to applied learning, practice-based learning describes an experience that integrates academic and workplace learning. Much of the learning comes from negotiating the boundaries between the academic and workplace context, and can look a bit different depending on where the learner falls in the overall landscape. A full-time student, for example, is more likely to be engaged in the transition from the academic context to the workplace context, while someone who is looking to change areas of practice negotiates between their current and future work roles (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2015). Or, in the case of the World of Work curriculum, young learners get to temporarily join a community of practice - one they may or may not join for real when they are adults. Through the stages of Exploration, Simulation, Meet a Pro, and Practice, learners experiencing the World of Work curriculum not only get to learn what experts do, but get to practice their skills too. Since students get exposure to different types of careers throughout the academic year, the curriculum provides an opportunity for students to explore their interests, in addition to getting to connect what they do in class to real-world skills.

Cultivating authenticity for learners through applied, experiential, and practice-based learning opportunities is becoming even more critical now that college demographics are changing. What was once considered "non-traditional" is now becoming the new traditional, with increasing numbers of part-time students who work full-time, and older adults who have already been working. If higher ed institutions are responsible for reacting to who needs education, then they have to start thinking beyond just getting students through content and focus on solving for the things in life that make it difficult to finish college. This may include designing more learning experiences that help students prepare to become practitioners in their preferred field and prepare for the workforce, because such a learning experience would facilitate the transition across boundaries.

• Arsenal of Examples - I've found that seeing, hearing about, reading about, or experiencing examples of other designs is what helps me the most in brainstorming ideas, or at least to kick off the brainstorming process. I hope to continually build an "arsenal" of a wide variety of memorable past examples that I can reference or think about when coming up with ideas myself.

  • Seeing and hearing about examples: I have found it particularly helpful when the Design Studio faculty use Engineering is Elementary (EiE) as an example of a curriculum and a lens through which we can examine the different parts of the design process.

  • Experiencing examples: Participating in the Teaching Tolerance activity in Design Studio was particularly helpful to my understanding of how the 5 key dimensions of a learning experience (invitations, mental models, engagement, learning objectives, and learner variation) come to life and are enacted through the design of a learning experience.

• Personas & Use Cases - Since design is an iterative process, brainstorming can occur at any time, not just at the beginning of a project! Developing personas and use cases can serve as practical tools for walking through a design (the whole process or just pieces of a design) from the perspective of a certain type of learner in the target audience. I've found that I often come up with even more ideas when I walk through my design with the personas I have developed, because it's an efficient way to identify gaps and inconsistencies without having to go through full-fledged testing.

  • An example from the Club Health Game project: Crafting our personas and associated use cases ended up serving as a very valuable exercise, as it helped us solidify the remaining features of the game, and also allowed us to check that our existing features made sense once we considered how a variety of “real” learners would go about playing it. Through developing the personas and use cases, a number of features were fleshed out: additional health scenarios, an additional feedback mechanism through a non-player character (NPC), and understanding how the game actually ends.

  • When developing personas and use cases, I think it's important to consider both the learner's point of view as well as the instructor's point of view (if it is a learning experience that involves an active instructor - this might not happen in a museum, for example). This is an area where to me, learning engineering stands out from instructional design, which sometimes stops at the instructor's point of view and emphasizes the delivery of content. By including both perspectives, a designer can consider things like how power dynamics play out in the instructor-learner relationship in the learning environment, which may give the designer ideas related to learner motivation.

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Bransford, J. D., & Schwartz, D. L. (1999). Chapter 3: Rethinking Transfer: A Simple Proposal With Multiple Implications. Review of Research in Education, 24(1), 61–100.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Gee, J.P. (2009). Deep learning properties of good digital games: how far can they go?. In Serious Games (pp. 89-104). Routledge.

Horn, M.S. (2018). Tangible Interaction and Cultural Forms: Supporting computer-based learning in informal environments. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 27(4), 1-34.

Kolodner, J., Said, T., Wright, K., and Pallant, A. (2017). Drawn into Science Through Authentic Virtual Practice. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, 385–391.

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Sandoval, W. (2014). Conjecture mapping: An approach to systematic educational design research. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 23(1), 18–36.

Shaffer, D.W. & Resnick, M. (1999). Thick Authenticity: New Media and Authentic Learning, Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 10(2).

Wenger-Trayner, E., Fenton-O'Creevy, M., Hutchinson, S., Kubiak, C., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Learning in landscapes of practice: boundaries, identity, and knowledgeability in practice-based learning. London: Routledge.