Jet Teaches Tech

Online and blended learning have many advantages over the traditional classroom. With the introduction of technology that is purposefully integrated into the learning process, the school’s walls can disappear, and learning can take place anywhere. This opens the learning environment for the educator, but how do we keep learners heading toward the lesson’s goal? This strategy is as easy as writing instructions for your digital learning environment.

Instructions in lesson design often require more attention. They are not just a post-planning checklist, but a powerful tool that can steer learning. This shift in perspective allows educators to actively refine understanding and drive the learning process.

Instructions in a digital learning environment need to be crystal clear and detailed. As learners will be working on different parts at different times, they will require clarification to progress. The instructions act as a map, guiding them through the lesson design. It’s your responsibility as an educator to provide this clear direction. A well-designed digital lesson or learning environment is open to learning anytime. The map created from the instructions needs to function anywhere the learners engage with the learning. When writing instructions, the goal is to clearly explain the learning goal and all the steps it takes to get there. Make sure to use intentional language setup in your class and include the academic vocabulary necessary for success. Instructions are a great way to ensure your learners are continually exposed to academic vocabulary. You, as the educator, will launch the learning experience by explaining all instructions to the learners. At that point, all terminology is explained and defined for all learners. Including grade-level vocabulary is essential, so all learners are exposed to that type of content.

All learners need to know the why behind the learning. The instructions are a great place to go over and discuss this. This helps all learners connect to the content, making the education more valuable and impactful. As an educator, you play a crucial role in facilitating the discussions. You need to be specific in what each learning experience step requires. Provide examples when possible. Multiple instances of different levels of work help learners gauge work and what is needed to reach scores in the rubric. Build-in checkpoints and breaks into the lesson and clearly state them in the instructions. This helps the learners know where to evaluate their work and gives them breaking points in the lesson. Learning contracts, which are agreements between the learner and the educator that outline the learner’s responsibilities and the educator’s support, can be used. It allows learners to set their own timelines based on the project’s total time and gives them ownership of their work. Your voice learning process helps push engagement, and the learners become stakeholders in the learning.

This type of lesson is a different learning environment than many learners have seen before. They will ask questions and expect the educator to answer them. If the instructions can answer those questions, point the learners back to the instructions. This step helps create a sense of self-efficacy for the learners. Learners know all the resources they need to succeed at the beginning of the lesson. If a learner asks a question to help clarify the instructions, help that understanding. Let the learners inside your thought process. After you answer the questions, go back and refine the instructions. If one learner has a question, many likely have the same or similar questions. Not only do you help other learners, but the educator also shows a draft thinking approach that lets the learners know you are constantly working to enhance the learning. Everyone, including the educator, needs help refining their thinking; no one is above doing that work. Be consistent in making those changes. Being authentic with your learners and having them see that process is vital to a welcoming learning environment.

By following those guidelines when creating the founding document of your digital lesson, your learning environment will become a thriving place for all learners. The task will progress, and the educator can start challenging the learners’ thinking instead of helping with procedures. This shift helps drive the learning environment to a space of deep learning.

Each decision in creating your digital learning environment is essential. Some are evident like the first two, and some are not like designing for the platform you will use for your learning. You can use many different platforms in today’s market for your learners to receive your instructions and provide their learning examples. Finding the correct one for your particular assignment is an important task.

Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Some are great at collecting the evidence of learning, but it is not quite good at providing detailed instructions. Some allow videos, images, and other media types to be used but don’t collect anything from your learners. The first two steps completed a basic design, and you have a basic idea of how you want this lesson to run. With this knowledge, look at the different platforms you can access and decide which one you want to use. If you need to use a lot of media in your instructions and provide further learning examples, a website might be the best. Your instructions might be clear, and you want the learners to focus on those and a rubric, then an LMS or online document is the best choice. There are many different ways to get your learners started and working.

There are some things to think about when looking at the platform. What do you need to include in your instructions? If you need several media pieces, some image examples of work, a heavily formatted or designed list of instructions needs to be a strength of the platform. If you will be collecting many different learning articles and need that step to be easy for your learners, that needs to be a strength. By thinking through the design platform, you make it easier for you and your learners to successfully work through the learning experience.

Digital learning designing starts the same as most lesson designing. You need to decide what your learner needs to gain from the digital lesson. Looking at the knowledge that will focus on the learning experience is the first step.

To clearly outline the goals and set up your next steps in digital lesson design, you need to set up your knowledge acquisition goals first. These goals will guide you as you map your learners’ route as they go through your lesson. The goals need to be as specific as you can set goals. That will help you to focus your planning on specific learning targets. If you are a K-12 educator, these are your essential standards. These are usually decided by your district or in PLCs. There need to guide your planning, learning path, and what your learners need to do to showcase their learning in a later planning step.

If you are in charge of designing learning for adults, this step is more critical. Adult learners need to understand the why of what they are learning. You need to focus on your learning outcomes and add why it is essential to your adult learner to gain this knowledge. The impact will be much more significant if that is part of the initial planning. Keeping adults focused on learning and not completing the tasks because they are assigned is found in this step.

Knowledge is the entire reason for setting up digital learning or any learning. Starting with the entire process’s goal gives your planning a clear purpose and destination. It is always best to start a journey with a destination in mind.

How your learners prove, their learning is how you will gauge their understanding of the content you want them to master. That is why this step is so early in the lesson design process. When properly designed, this step will allow your learners to showcase their learning and help guide them to a deeper understanding. Knowledge acquisition is to be a journey and not a destination. Designing ways for your learners to prove what they have gained in their learning experience allows them to be active participants. It will enable the educator to help them along this path.

A digital environment allows for doors to open that were not there in a physical space. The change in learning spaces can make for a more robust way for your learners to prove their learning to you. Having your learners think about things differently and showcase those different perspectives is a great way to take advantage of technology in a digital lesson. Expressing these different perspectives in a video, picture, or another method can allow your learners to express themselves and, at the same time, will enable you to check to see if they got the content you set out as necessary in the previous step. Having adult learners use the topics in their daily lives or a work environment will help them create better habits. It will nudge them to use the content you are teaching without being too intrusive in their everyday routines. When designed this way, your learners prove their knowledge in different ways and helps to create the cognitive dissonance that creates deeper learning and more knowledge retention.

Remember, this is your assessment piece as well. It is how to gauge the understanding of your learners. It needs to be something with a rubric for you and your learners to know what to expect and how you will assess them. All of the assessment information, including rubrics and instructions, need to be given to your learners at the start of the learning process to understand the entire learning process from the beginning.

The second step in designing digital learning is about how your learners prove their knowledge. It needs to have a design feature that takes advantage of your digital environment instead of looking at ways to use in-person assessments in a digital environment.

The past few months of self-quarantine have opened our eyes to many different things we haven’t seen before. Issues and problems are coming up that were not on the radar just a few short months ago. One of these issues is the role of digital education in the learning environment.

Digital education was done at higher education levels to help others learn when they could not meet in person, but in K-12, it was much less prevalent. It seems that most post-bac degrees have gone mostly, if not totally, online. This form of education was the only means for much of the nation as K-12 schools shut down. The use of technology in the classroom was something many teachers did not understand outside of basic skills. Designing meaningful digital learning is something that is a skill needed for today’s educators. It is more than just taking your in-person training, classes, or workshops and putting them online. The digital space is a vast world of information that the instructional designer can leverage to open up the learning experience to places that were not possible in a physical space. These possibilities must be planned out following a different design process than traditional in-person learning. There are six steps to designing digital learning. I will quickly go over these steps and go into more detail on each one later.

The first step is knowledge. You must clearly define what you want your learners to walk away knowing, understanding, or being able to do/accomplish. This guides each of the other steps and will serve as the foundation of the design. The foundation needs to be strong and very clear. Next, you will decide how you want your learners to prove their learning. It could be passing a short survey or exam, creating something at the end of the workshop, or some other way of proving skills. The important thing is this task needs to be defined and relayed to your learners from the beginning. All learners, adults especially, need to know where their new knowledge is going to be applied.

Then the designer will decide the platform for delivery. This step allows you to plan with the strengths of the platform in mind and allows you to minimize any weakness of that platform. The online learning environment has many different platforms, all with their strengths and weakness, and if you properly plan for those, your learning experience will be better for that. Then you will design your learning experience. This can be one module is a much larger course or the large course itself. This step is used for large-scale planning and individual module planning. It can be repeated until the entire course is built. The last planning step is writing your instructions. This step is often overlooked, and the learning experience is launched, but it is important to take time on this step. Clear and thorough instructions are important to a successful learning experience. The learner needs to know what t do at any time in their journey through your content. After all of these steps are done, it is time to launch your digital learning. This is where the designer hands off the learning to the facilitator, and the learning begins.

In today’s educational environment, moving to digital learning is an important change that needs to happen at all levels. It allows for education to reach further than it has in the past and hopefully, with properly designed lessons, create learners who understand the technology’s power and use it to learn into their futures.