6 - Instructional Design and Technology

This week, our focus has been on the pedagogical strategies used for the development of activities with  a focus on constructivist learning. The constructivist learning concept is taken from the perspective that the student develops their own knowledge, as if they are constructing the overall concept from their experiences. In this process, learning is contextual, active, social, and reflective, and each process adds to the depth of understanding through experiences. As students make sense of new material, they must contextualize the concepts using their own prior knowledge about the topics. Project based learning provides a vehicle for active learning, whereby students learn by doing in a student-centered approach. As the student works through the learning activities, their social interactions with peers and teacher facilitators adds a deeper level of understanding and context through evaluation of their product to those who they work with. As the project cycle ends, a reflective student evaluates the entirety of the process, including what has been learned and what to identify what should follow in the learning sequence.

To facilitate the constructivist philosophy of education, thoughtful instructional design with a backwards design scheme should precede specific projects or technology integration. By clearly identifying concepts that should be demonstrated at the end of a specific unit or sequence, the activities can be designed to align learning objectives to activities and assessments. Technology can be used as the mechanism to differentiate the activities, especially in scenarios where assistive technologies can provide a student the opportunity to maximize their ability to complete tasks with a high degree of success. 

One specific lesson design that facilitates a constructivist learning philosophy is the WebQuest model, which we have begun as our own project this week [my project]. The WebQuest is an online project based learning model, which outlines learning objectives through an introduction, tasks, processes, evaluation, and a final conclusion. This inquiry-oriented activity should provide students with enough information and direction to begin a process, but allow enough flexibility to encourage research and interaction with the content to encourage the student to make decisions about the final outcome and how to best achieve the goal of the activity, including how to best integrate technological solutions into the completion of the task.