Designing for Learning and Learners

Designing for learning and learners has many essential design components in general, such as following the iterative process, planning, prototyping, and refining. Still, it strongly stresses learning objectives and the context of each design you do, which makes it a unique practice. The design, lenses you look through, and approaches you use might differ depending on your learner population, venue, and learning objectives.

Objectives come first: I have been learning the importance of concentrating on goals and going back to them often. It is easy to get lost in the concepts you come across or technologies you encounter and want to use, thus having that as your primary goal, where the learning objectives come second. As learning engineers, it is essential to remember that what you want your learners to get out of the experience they are involved in comes first, with all the other components being a means to get there.

Your learners are important: I have been learning a lot about the importance of the learner population in every class that I took during the last year. I understand the importance of learning in two main ways:

firstly, depending on who your learners are, their background knowledge, and what motivates and interests them are essential to the design. They are the main components that will help you achieve a successful design that will invite learners, keep the engagement and successfully direct them to learning objectives.

The two projects, "Hug Bug" and "Sustainable Self Care," in my portfolio stress the importance of the learner population for me. In the "Hug Bug," my main goal was for my learners to find out for themselves that engineering interests them and is something they can successfully do. This objective meant that I needed to know my learners (10-12y/o girls) and their interests to be able to introduce another one to them in a manner that they would accept. My final design, which you can read more about here, had the culturally relevant interests of the learners embedded in the activity, which helped me achieve the learning objectives.