Serendipity35

When I interviewed for an instructional designer position with Google a few years ago, I was convinced that they were looking to take their Classroom product wider and deeper. I thought that they were ready to take on Blackboard, Canvas et al and start to integrate their free LMS with student information systems, add a gradebook etc.  Mixed in with all their existing tools for video streaming (YouTube) and conferencing (Hangouts) plus Docs and the rest, I really expected them to offer a free LMS that colleges would use. It would be very tempting. Look at how many colleges switched over to Gmail as the official institutional mail system. 

"Nontraditional" learning management systems (I'm thinking of both paid and free ones) have increased in online courses. Much of that movement has come from MOOC use and also from companies who have created their own systems to promote training and course offerings.

A new article from EDUCAUSE looks at graduate student use of Google Classroom. If you were using Classroom for your course a few years ago, you were more likely to be teaching in K-12 than at the undergraduate or graduate levels.

The study looks at many of the areas that have been studied before: improving effectiveness, increasing students' interactions with each other and their instructors and building community online. The difference is the audience of grad students.

The earliest MOOCs were using nontraditional web applications like Facebook and Twitter for higher education. But their use has been more limited - perhaps for an assignment - and few educators would call any one of them or a combination to be the equivalent of an LMS.

The study also points out that products like Schoology have borrowed a lot of UI and design from sites like Facebook. 

This study is small - "When asked if they would use Google Classroom again, five of the seven participants said, "yes." I would consider using Google Classroom again as well, but only for a small course."  But it is a study worth conducting at other institutions and with larger classes, even MOOC-sized ones. 

The author, Stephanie Blackmon, feels "the stream can be a bit daunting for some students" and she is hesitant to rely on it for larger classes. I would be less hesitant, but I don't think Classroom is ready to be the nontraditional LMS for a traditional college-credit course.

But some company, perhaps Google, is going to offer that free LMS and that's when things will really get interesting.

 

 

An overview of Google Classroom features:

"Next Billion" is a term you will find used in talking about the future of the internet. It refers to not only the exponential growth in connectivity in emerging markets, such as India, but also the growth of next-level technology in more mature markets. 

One thing that is evident is that the next billion internet users are much more likely to be using mobile phones than a computer.  Globally, half of all internet users got online in February 2017 using mobile devices. It is still a close race with 45% accessing the web on laptops or desktop computers, but break out the number for emerging markets, like India, and the mobile wins easily. In India and other countries that did not have wired infrastructure in place for Net connectivity, and did not have a population able to purchase computers, mobile and wireless are the only choice. Indians accessed the internet through their mobiles nearly 80% of the time. 

This is also changing the way providers, carriers, phone manufacturers and related companies (such as Google/Alphabet) design.

For example, the emerging next billion tends not to type searches, emails, or even text messages. These newcomers avoid text and use voice activation and communicating with images. Part of this is due to their unfamiliarity with the devices, and partly it is due to a less educated and literate population. They are using low-end smartphones (Android dominates) and cheap data plans along with the most intuitive apps that let them navigate easily.

What does this have to do with education?

My first thought is that even if your students are part of the "first billion" population, delivery of learning online needs to very seriously address mobile use, and the user interfaces need to be intuitive and less text-based.

My second thought is that educational providers, especially post-secondary, need to be prepared for the next billion learners who will not be coming to them in the same ways, or with the same goals, or with the same devices. When I say "educational providers," I am thinking of much more than schools and universities.

No doubt some of this has already been taking place through online learning and especially with the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Open Educational Resources (OER), but the pathways are not even well established for the first billion, and certainly not for the next billion.

 

 

 

I have been teaching since 1975. I have done instructional design (ID) since 2000. The job of an ID was not one I knew much about before I started managing a department tasked with doing it at a university. I hired people trained in ID, but I learned it myself along the way.

As others have said, the job of an instructional designer seems mysterious. One suggestion has been to change the title to Learning Experience Designer. Does that better describe the job and also apply to people who work in corporate and training settings?

I have taught courses about UX (user experience) which involves a "person’s behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system or service” (according to Wikipedia). Part of that study involves UI (user interface) which “includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects” of the interaction as well as “a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.”

With more online learning and also blended online and face-to-face learning, there is more attention being given to the learner experience (LX). How students interact with learning, seems to be more than what “user experience” (UX) entails.

UX was coined in the mid ‘1990s by Don Norman. He was then VP of advanced technology at Apple, and he used it to describe the relationship between a product and a human. It was Norman's idea that technology should evolve to put user needs first. That was actually the opposite of how things were done at Apple and most companies. But by 2005, UX was fairly mainstream.

"Learning experience design" was coined by Niels Floor in 2007, who taught at Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

I wrote earlier here about how some people in education still find the job of an instructional designer to be "mysterious."  But call it UX or LX or ID, customizing learning, especially online, is a quite active job categories in industry and and education. Designers are using new tools and analytics to decode learning patterns.

In higher-education job postings and descriptions, I am seeing more examples of LX design as a discipline. That is why some people have said that Learning Experience Design is a better title than Instructional Design. It indicates a shift away from “instruction” and more to "learning." 

According to an article at insidehighered.com/digital-learning/  "The field has been around for 75 years, but many still wonder what instructional designers - who are gaining acceptance in higher ed - do."  Having worked in the field for 17 years, I wonder why people (especially in higher ed) still wonder what instructional designers do.

EXCERPT:
"The practice of instructional design emerged during World War II, when the military assembled groups of psychologists and academics to create training and assessment materials for troops. In 1954, Harvard University psychology professor and author B. F. Skinner introduced the concept of programmed instructional materials through his article “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching.”

Within a decade, noted academics -- including Robert Gagne, widely considered the father of the field of instructional design -- had embraced the importance of assessment and learning objectives in teaching and learning.

Although higher education typically left course design up to the professors who would teach in traditional classrooms, the popularity of online courses created a need for input from professionals trained in the science of teaching, instructional methods and the technology that would make learning possible for remote students.

And now, the field is growing. A 2016 report funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation estimated that a minimum of 13,000 instructional designers work on college campuses. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last year counted 151,000 jobs -- across all school levels and industries -- for instructional designers and those with similar titles: instructional technologist and director of educational research and product strategy, for example. In 2012, CNN Money predicted the field would grow by 28.3 percent within 10 years...

“We’re going to find a digital comparison [with the face-to-face classroom], but it will further encroach on the decisions faculty believe are their domain,” [Lance Eaton, an instructional designer at Brandeis University] said. “The institution might feel otherwise, and the institutional designer will be the person in the middle trying to balance that dynamic.”
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