As online distance education courses continue to expand their reach and serve a broader audience, we are required to understand the affordances and challenges of supporting equitable learning environments. The globalization of online distance education requires instructional designers and educators to work outside of their own bias to address a learner population that represents a […]
Category: Design
Social Presence Expectations in Distance Education
How can learning design adapt social presence to the needs and expectations of learners in online distance education? In the book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle, she explores the relationship of our digital addiction to connect socially at the expense of face-to-face interactions. In her research, Turkle reports that […]
Exploring the influence of Color on Learning
Over the Thanksgiving break, I was designing a poster presentation for an upcoming conference – and was stuck with picking out the right color palette. In Academia, this is supposedly a ‘wasteful dilemma’ because the color, formatting, design etc are weighted much less than the research itself, but this was still a dilemma that could […]
Design Thinking: An Identity in Crisis
Design thinking has been accepted by many. Unfortunately, as the terminology continues to gain traction, many adopters vaguely apply design-like processes to solve wicked problems, under the guise of “design thinking”. Perhaps it’s time to do something different. Maybe it’s time to re-identify. What is Design Thinking? Beginning in the 1950’s creative techniques and problem-solving […]
Reclaiming the Human in HCI : a user-first design approach
Author: Donny K. Tusler Title attributed to Sonia Tiwari What is Human Centered Interaction? “Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field of study focusing on the design of computer technology and, in particular, the interaction between humans (the users) and computers. While initially concerned with computers, HCI has since expanded to cover almost all forms […]
Criticism, a learner’s greatest tool… and why distance education makes this achievable
I recently read Brookfield’s, “A Political Analysis of Discussion Groups: Can the Circle Be Unbroken?”. Brookfield has worked diligently on the topic of critical analysis as a tool for learning. (Brookfield, 2000, 1001)I found this an interesting take on how people feel about themselves through the examples he provided as vignettes. Brookfield’s vignettes provide this pattern […]
Idea for designing online PhD activities
As Ph.D. students of the Learning, Design, and Technology program, our blog posts here in the GA Fellows site often discuss learning theory, technologies, and even our personal experiences. But with this post, I wanted to outline a design idea for online Ph.D. courses. This is one of those eventualities the marketplace is pushing for. […]
Organizing a collaborative online space
Writing and developing a research project is daunting and difficult to do by oneself. But within a group and with one member remote we have had to be very organized. First, we found a collaborative work space that allowed us to maintain permissions for security and privacy, but still allowed us to save, share, and […]