Instructional Design and Technology

This week we will discuss instructional design. Departing from the constructionist theories of Vygotsky (1978) and the descriptions by Discoll (2002), Bauer (2014) understands learning as contextual, active, social, and reflective. Contextual because we construct knowledge by associating new elements with what we already know. Active, because the process is an active construction, as opposed to some kind of one-directional stream of content that goes into our brains and stays there through constant drilling. Paulo Freire (1970) described the later example the “banking” mode for learning, in which educators are the ones who have all that is to be learned and they deliver it to students, who are supposed to be blank slates.  Social, because we learn through interactions with others, such as modeling, and because in isolation the important element of affect would be missing. And reflective because it involves thinking over what we know and being flexible to modify our beliefs once we have constructed them. In Freire’s though, the connection between practical knowledge, theory, and reflection, is called praxis (Freire, 1970).

The belief that learning is contextual, active, social, and reflective is fundamental for the development of critical pedagogy, which is an application of critical thinking (the Frankfurt school tradition) to education (see Giroux, 2007; and Freire 1970). I found this connection particularly meaningful because, as critical pedagogy states “education is not neutral” and that “it is impossible to separate what we do in the classroom from the economic and political conditions that shape our work” (Giroux, 2007, pp. 2–3). Is in the mood of that statement that I found that to understand learning as contextual, active, social, and reflective is politically compromised with democracy.

Click on the picture to go to Paulo Freire Institute website, where you can find more information about Critical Pedagogy and Paulo Freire.

Technology can help educators to make encourage contextual, active, asocial, and reflective learning by making it an active and personalized process in which the student is able to make important decisions on the content and the methods of her own learning process. Using guided inquiry processes such as WebQuests, educators can stimulate students to find their own paths to a specific content. The use of instructional software is also a way in which students can personalize their learning process (especially in music education). The ability to share information also makes technology suitable to make the learning process social, and through the sharing of feedback, it also helps to make it reflective. All mentioned affordances of technology in learning do not mean that technology based or assisted learning is the only or the best alternative, but as educators is one alternative we have to be aware of.

Project Based Learning (PBL) is an approach to learning that also takes in account the contextual, active, social, and reflective characteristics of learning. In this approach, an issue is explored, and a project is proposed to be undertaken by the students and teachers. Different approaches to achieve the proposed outcome are explored and decisions are made in hands-on fashion. Finally, through the completion of the project, a number of varied learning outcomes are achieved. To be able to complete the projects, students have to recur to their own ingenuity, to their previous learning and experiences, to new theories, materials, and methods, engaging actively in a group effort which requires a great amount of reflection. Finally, specific contents are learned through a process that is closely related to a real-world experience, and therefore is meaningful. Technology can also be used in PBL, as WebQuests are designed as projects, although it differs to other PBL approaches in that the project is predetermined by its author instead of being proposed by students and teachers as a team.

To learn more about PBL, click on the picture.

Backward design is a concept that is fairly new to me. Being an educator, I have reviewed several planning approaches, and they all have something good you can learn from them. Usually, what I would do is to set up a learning outcome or goal, then an activity to achieve that goal, and then an evaluation system. In backward design, you start with the outcome, but then go immediately to the evaluation stage. Does it sound weird? Actually, now that I have thought about it, I think it is pretty logic. We know what we want to achieve, and it is logical to figure out the way in which we can know if students have learned, and then to think of how we can work our way to achieve those measurable behaviors (Bauer, 2014). When we leave assessment to the last part of our design, we are planning on activities to achieve an outcome, but we have not stated how that outcome will be manifest in an observable behavior. While it is true that every stage is connected, and that there is a certain statements of the observable behavior within our learning outcomes, by setting assessment as the second stage we are able to make more informed decisions when selecting our activities.

On the other hand, when stating an assessment level before setting our activities, we have to evaluate a product, which implies that the process itself is not the focus of assessment but it is a product-oriented process. Usually that is the case in music education that is performance based. In general music classroom, however, sometimes the process is more important than the outcome, especially since what we are attempting to do is to develop an affective response to music making. Again, it is not the only option, but is something we cannot just disregard as educators. In technology assisted learning modality, backwards design can be a particularly useful approach, especially since there is not the person to person contact that allows a teacher to assess the evolution of students regarding a specific issue.

If you are interested in learning more about backward design, you can watch the following video. Thanks for reading!