An Industry Liaison for Graduate Learners
I used a combination of listservs, live synchronous sessions, and collaborative documents to create a professional partnership with Leo Learning Inc. The relationship accessed more authentic and transferable learning in a Masters in Instructional Technology Program. In collaboration with Rose Benedicks, Strategic Lead, we paired learners with practicing designers and developed an integrated curriculum where both practicing learning designers and Masters students benefited from the relationships.
The design was nominated for an award in 2020 by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT).
The study of the Industry Liaison project revealed where misconceptions arise about design work, and how the field of instructional design collectively feels about those issues. Published in Tech Trends by Springer Press, learners credited the Liaison Design for the program’s 100% job placement rate over 5 years.
Collaborative Video Annotation (CVA)
I combined asynchronous annotating with selected prerecorded video to bring observations to scale. Using the annotation feature in YouTube to facilitate teaching observations in a large class of over 140 students saved hours of coordination and produced a more controlled learning environment. Often, teaching observations provide unreliable results where learners view a wide range of skill levels and disparate content. In CVA, expert commentary appeared in the design, creating an AI-like experience for the learners. This design brought learning to scale, increasing higher-order thinking measures by over 300%. Rod Myers provided a script to facilitate analysis of the design.
My CVA design was featured in two books about innovative learning design (Bonk & Khoo, 2014; Paulus, Lester, and Dempster, 2014). I published the analysis of the learning that took place in the design in Tech Trends, and in the Handbook of Research on Critical Thinking Strategies (2019). A multimedia presentation of the design process was published in the International Journal of Designs for Learning. I include this design here because, besides being an award-winning design, it accomplishes what instructional technology is all about— it made learning more effective by focusing the learning objectives through shared content that was otherwise not accessible, engaging by connecting learners to their peers in the observation process, and efficient by bringing it to scale for hundreds of learners.
Simultaneous Peer Review
In blended, at-a-distance learning, synchronous time is precious and costly. I designed an intervention where learners in different roles could simultaneously provide feedback and critique, and in doing so, optimize synchronous time. The design exponentially increased learner feedback in what is otherwise a laborious process of isolated presentations. While the presenting learner occupies the verbal channels in the synchronous space, learners collaboratively document and developed their commentary in a digital document in the LMS. Other learners’ feedback on the collaborative document did not inhibit listening; rather, voiced questions in the synchronous space became more targetted and developed. This practice was highlighted by the UT Office of Information and Technology as a teaching and learning innovation and a Best Practice in Online Learning. I published an analysis of the design constraints and the weighted design decisions surrounding the choices in the International Journal of Designs for Learning where I collaborated with John Baaki. I have included this design here because it illustrates the advantages of online learning over other configurations, and exemplifies how, if designed with care, online interventions can accomplish what is otherwise impossible in a normal classroom.
craig dennis howard 