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.