#LAK12 Am I the only instructional designer on this course?

I have a background in learning psychology and ITS, but I guess I mostly feel that I am an instructional designer...

As an instructional designer I struggle with the atomistic, almost mechanical view of learning presented today, like learning can be split up into little pieces that can be combined like lego blocks by some system that can take over the role of the teacher. Haven't we tried this in ITS & learning object times? In my world we have come to the conclusion that this view too simplistic, it might work for (non-complex) STEP domains or some part-tasks but it doesn't apply to learning complex tasks. There are fundamental problems here, that cannot be solved with big data or powerful computing.

Not that I think that EDM or LAC is useless..... but I think we should be using it for things that human teachers are not good at (and he, we know why some teachers are more effective than others, ask the principal or the students and they'll tell you :-))

For example, keeping an overview on lots of information from different sources...
- so yes, if you can help me to identify students who are 'bad writers' early on (start looking at writing assignments in different courses, but there might be other predictors too)
- so yes, if you can help me to collect and synthesize information about my communication skills from different courses, exams, people....






I'll think about other areas this week.
Daniëlle

#lak12 - Big data - small questions?

Big data ..... big assumptions?

A large part of big data are things that I do not want or need to know, and a large part of what I want to know is not in the data (or not analyzable). The number of messages between team members doesn't say anything about how well they fuction as a team, and we don't measure the messages that should have been sent :-)
Looking backwards on n Google's story I also wonder: analyzing which colour makes people interact more. So why do we think that more interaction is always better?

Big data..... wrong questions?

Big data make us ask questions about things that can be measured. These questions are not always the most important questions. Can't hurt?
In my world teachers only spend a limited amount of time and attention on improving their course when they get the evaluations. If they spend time on examining which learning resources were used by students, they won't spend it on thinking about the depth of the discussions.


I suppose my preliminary conclusion could be that it is all about asking the right questions.
It is also, howver, very much about not asking the wrong qeustions :-)

Starting with my first MOOC #LAK12

Just a brief introduction... My name is Daniëlle Verstegen and I am an assistant professor at at the department of educational development and research of the faculty of health, medicine and life sciences of Maastricht University in the Netherlands (a direct colleague of Jeroen Donkers).

I have a background in learning psychology and cognitive scienc. I have worked mostly in the field of instructional design and e-learning. It is probably the instructional designer in my that always wants to start with the question: what's the problem? and what's the goal? Analyzing learner behaviour, but what for?

My second comment is probably a frustration from knowledge-management-hype days: please let's not try to share too much information, because nobody will use it (or even read it).

Enough for now, I am curious how my views will develop over the weeks. We are following this course with a few colleagues and we intend to pull the discussion into our workspace (face-to-face as well). Very old-fashioned :-)

Daniëlle