Thread:Learning and Content Design (1)

Ben,

I saw your post to the WE google group and thought I'd take a look at your proposed learning materials and offer some constructive criticism. First I have to say that my area of expertise is not English language learning, but over the past few weeks I've been studying the various materials on WE related to learning design and thought I could share some of what I've learned.

First, looking over your materials, I can understand your vision -- it seems useful and doable. Here are some areas for thought:


 * It seems to me that users within any particular topic or subject will fall into two groups: 1) individuals interested in facilitating learning: teachers, coaches, mentors, facilitators and 2) individuals whose primary goal is learning or improving their skill in that area. Which role a particular user takes as he/she approaches a content area will depend on the content and the level of instruction. I've come to the conclusion that the "front" page of a resource should probably be tailored to the learner, with a small section at the bottom that links individuals to a subpage for those interested in creating, maintaining, facilitating.... instruction in this content area.


 * Like you I've been creating a structure for a learning project. See the page I created called Open Computing. That first page is targeted mainly to learners, with the project planning page designed as the main page for facilitators/content developers.


 * I think that creating learning resources collaboratively might work best (notice all of the hedging here) under a distributed model. That is, content designers create various resources that can be pulled together in various ways to meet different learner needs. Having a place to discuss the full scope of resources in a content area is critical. You might also want to consider creating a style guide to provide design guidelines (see Open Computing Style Guide as an example) and begin thoughts on standards and evaluation (see the Quality Assurance Framework).


 * I found that spending some time writing about the learning design and content design aspects of a proposed learning resource is very beneficial. You can see a beginning structure for this in my project to create a spreadsheet tutorial. See the box at the bottom of the page. I created that box with Template:Learning Design.

Just thought I'd share some of the concepts that I've been reading about and then trying out in the work I'm doing. Good luck with your project. I'm happy to help (or offer more constructive criticism ) as needed. Just let me know.

Your Wikineighbor, Alison