Teaching and Learning Lab (TLL) Practicum - A Reflection of the Semester

The Teaching and Learning Lab Practicum (aka T-127) course is a project-based practicum that provides students with the opportunity to participate in the instructional design and development of curricular assets for online learning experiences.

In this post, I want to reflect on my growth throughout the term - things I learned in the course and how it connects with other experiences such as HGSE courses, internships, and research.

One key aspect of the course is the final capstone project in which my group and I created mock-ups of one of the foundational courses for HGSE students. In order to reimagine the course and create artifacts to showcase our design and thinking, we had to follow the ADDIE model (see previous post). My group and I really spent time understanding our learners and their needs through various methods. We talked to different stakeholders to better understand the learner experience from as many perspectives as we can. And all this was done after we had already dug through and analyzed quantitative data collected by the learning design team for the original course. As much as we can learn and answer correlational questions through numbers, speaking to the learners and stakeholders can help us capture a more nuanced understanding to their experiences.

Course Structure

The TLL course is structured in a way that allows us to experience different kinds of learning design so that we are learning about the concepts being taught to us in a very immersive way. This structure encourages us to dissect learning design frameworks in a personal and critical way. It's one thing to analyze frameworks objectively, but going through them yourself adds an important experiential dimension. The first couple of weeks focused on learning theories, a review of how people learn concepts - a course we reimagined for our capstone project. We thought about novice to expert and some of the mechanisms of how that happens as well as the challenges it presents for instruction. We also investigated potential limitations of existing frameworks for learning design and overlaps between designs within different frameworks. Overall, I really enjoyed the course structure as we experience what we are learning about and it gives the opportunity to further dissect it after having experienced it first hand.

Portfolio-making

Another aspect of the course is creating a portfolio documenting our reflections and projects. This will be useful for me in my future career endeavors as I can display my projects in an interactive way, not just talking about a thing I did. Many of my other classes also ask for a portfolio but mostly to document projects. While documenting projects is useful, the reflective component pushes me to think critically about how my understanding and skills are evolving over time. This metacognitive practice of periodically reflecting on my progress is excellent preparation for a career in learning design/instruction. I think the reflective piece in this class is incredibly important and will showcase growth and thinking along the way. I will continue making reflective post as I add to my portfolio in the future.

Multimedia in Online Learning Design

One of my biggest takeaway from this course regarding technology in learning design is that as a learning designer, we should take caution in our design choices - particularly what media is being used. Every design choice needs to be grounded in theory and pedagogy. We must utilize data, quant and qual, to direct our choices so that students are immersed and engaged in ways that we hope would promote their learning and leave them with understanding of skills and knowlege even after the end of their course. We want to think about things like why we want to use a video and what elements need to be included to be the most effective for student learning.

One of the hardest thing about learning design is thinking about univerisal design for learning while providing opportunities for learners to engage in a personalized way. But that is the fun in learning design.