Learner Centered Concepts
December 23, 2016 12:00 AM
Hey Everyone!
It has been a while. Crazy how busy one can get. I'm back in school working on a doctorate in curriculum and assessment to enhance my instructional design degrees. This has led me to wonder about credentials and the blending of education with design. I have found that my educational background and expertise has given the projects I work on a pretty clear focus on the learner and their experience. However, getting SMEs to focus on this aspect versus just the content is a challenge. I also have encountered a lot of developers who are very content driven and can forget that there is a learner to be concerned about as well as standards that must be mastered. There are modules that provide information and modules that provide professional development. I know I have had this conversation a bit before. However, this made me wonder how others engage creating curricula or are you typically given content from which to design and develop? I am often given a blank slate or a list of benchmarks and tasked with building actual curriculum for courses versus one stand alone module (language is always an issues when discerning a module from a course from a unit from a chapter...etc.). Anyhow, do you use a learner centered approach/philosophy? Is this important? Is there a difference between "training" and "professional development"?
Happy Holidays!
PS. I finally have my own Lectora license and can start developing along with my designs!!! Happy Me!!! :-)
Discussion (1)
I am a fan of the learner centered approach which I believe will be increasingly important as AI begins to impact our field. Adaptive course design is my passion. However, working for a large corporation our learning audience remains the same, which means it is easily overlooked. Assignments are predominantly training on new products, thus content rules. The other problem is that managers and executives are not aware of what good learning development can accomplish. Impacting employee performance involves much more than delivering content.