CAUTION! This blog may will take you about 5 minutes to read
and lifetime to complete. You have been warned.
For us, as 21st century instructional designers
(ID) in the digital space, the subject of educational theory should be integral
to our work. This is because the effectiveness of training now falls squarely
on our shoulders; there is no instructor who can turn a turkey of a course into
a sumptuous Christmas dinner.
This being the case, it is always a bit of a disappointment
to read the abstracts on those ID webinars that appear in my inbox on a daily
basis. I have never seen one that even loosely references any educational
theory. They regularly boast that if I follow their five/seven/ten (delete as
non-applicable) rules for <insert
topic> then I will have wonderful and engaging elearning or mlearning or
whatever. I am sorry to admit that I seldom bother reading these pearls
anymore, because they have yet to provide me with anything more than the rehashed
opinion of someone who may or may not be an industry guru.
An admission
I have never read Vygotsky Mind and Society in Russian. There you go; I am outed.
One of the problems for most of us who work in the digital
learning ID sector is that there is barely time to keep up with technological
advances, without wading through 300 pages of the Piaget’s The Language and Thought of the Child. And where do you start? The
psychology of learning, the physiology of memory, the philosophy of education? How
about the educational theories; behaviourism and Skinner, cognitivism and Bloom,
constructivism and Piaget, Social Development Theory and Vygotsky, Dewey,
Bruner, and on and on.
It’s a big field and there are plenty of theories,
quasi-theories and paradigms to go round.
So where do we start?
The road to…
Like most of the world, start with Wikipedia to get the
basics. The Educational Psychology
page gives a fair breakdown of the runners and riders in the world of
educational theorising. From there you just follow the hyperlinks or do new
searches based on what you have just read: listen to people talking about
educational theories on YouTube; start to pick up some TedTalks on the subject.
Give yourself an afternoon and you will soon realise that you will need a few
years.
But then, think about what you have just been doing.
I have set you a problem, without a ready-made solution. I
may have told you about one Wikipedia web page, but from there you were on your
own. This is what real education is about. This is Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development in action.
You know some stuff (even if it is just that you don’t know lots of other
stuff) and you have used a series of Internet-based More Knowledgeable Others (Vygotsky again) to help you learn
something more. And all of this knowledge, these theories, anti-theories, musings
and comments, are coalescing in your head in a very constructivist manner. Try
going the whole hog and getting some colleagues to do the same thing, then meet
up over coffee and discuss what you have discovered. Social constructivism in
the office; it’s a heart-warming thought.
An apology
So you have taken the first steps to becoming a
substance-based ID, rather than one who is just chasing the next fad (complete
with some handy acronym). But I am afraid that that is not the end.
What you have done (or will do) is now going to inform your
digital learning development from here on in. The next time that you start
designing a course you will be thinking about how the content is going exploit
one or more of the educational theories that you have been investigating. You
will no longer be happy to design some click-through rote-learning sheep-dip.
Your assessments will no longer just ask students to regurgitate the piece of
information from bullet 3 on page 6 of your course. You are going to want to set
them challenges where they take control of their learning. You are going to
want to develop active learning
content.
Sorry about this, but you are never going to be satisfied
with an MCQ again.
A reality check
But don’t think that you will never be limited in your
ambitions again. Resources (skills, time and money) will still constrain what
you can create. You may feel that your learners should be taking your training
out into the workplace with a series of situated learning assignments, while
your stakeholder says that they just want 10 True/False questions with a pass
mark of 80%, and you will do what the budget allows.
Another admission: I do.
However, when you next talk to a customer about what they
could do to make their digital learning successful it is going to be different.
You are going to blow them away by your knowledge and understanding of what makes
a good course and why. You probably won’t name-drop Jerome Bruner or any of the
others, but you will be able explain that sound educational theories will make
the training that you design effective.
Enjoy!