Facilitating Design Experiences

Facilitating Design Experiences

Brad Griffith - September 16, 2016

For my first attempt at conducing a LEM session, I chose something I actually had to perform on the same day:  presenting strategic development and planning sessions to a group of college administrators.  

I sent out the following agenda to a few team members in advance of the meeting. 

This had to be modified for my session because the attendees changed.  You can see that this is a design session since I have not yet conducted one of these meetings.

For the meeting room, I arranged three movable dry erase boards in front of a horseshoe-shaped seating arrangement.  I thought it would be great to have people facing one another to facilitate a more collaborative design experience.

I gave my attendees a copy of the agenda, LEM blocks to write on, a LEML framework guide, and writing utensils.  They also received a document that I planned to circulate in my meeting because I wanted them to see what information would be given to the learners.

I began this meeting by giving a few details of why we were here and discussing the purpose, goals, and expectations of the strategy session proposal meetings I will hold with other departments. I even went as far as to have a board dedicated to the discover and understand phases.

This was a great discussion! We highlighted some of the goals and expectations of the meeting and found some trends that clarified some of the points that needed to be emphasized or streamlined during the presentation.  I didn't want to get into the building blocks here yet and I think that served me well to keep the initial flow of brainstorming before trying to bring some structure to the conversation and ideas.

In the understand phase, I started asking questions about what we had written from the discover phase, illustrating along the way how some of the things we discussed fit into LEML.  At this point, there's no arrangement of the blocks, but we did start with the evidence block first (people request the strategy session that I'm offering).  

The discussion that arose after this was incredibly rich and helped me, as the facilitator of this environment, empathize with my learners (audience of administrators) in a different way.  We had some challenging discussions of how my organization and this project are perceived and how we can make sure we are communicating the correct message in the correct way.

 This is the model we established in the envision phase.  Not only did this allow me to address some concerns I had about doing this presentation, but I it helped me to hold an efficient and effective meeting.

I feel lucky in that I quickly incorporated some of the feedback from my attendees into this learning environment and just a few hours later had to actually go out and make it happen!  Having designed this learning environment beforehand in this way allowed me to have a confident and successful meeting. For the record, the evidence block here was absolutely achieved since I received an email request for getting started on a blended learning strategy session WHILE I was giving my presentation to the college administration!

Considering the close time-frame from the design of this learning environment to bringing to fruition,
I plan to hold another meeting with my attendees to conduct a diagnostic design experience for this learning environment.  This is a simple model for the time being, but I think it could be analyzed in a more fine tuned way.  I felt personally that I could incorporate more dialogue into the meeting. All of that considered, next time, I plan to do many things similar to how I conducted this session.

Modeling Agenda Design

Modeling Agenda Design

Brad Griffith - September 15, 2016

I'm excited to hold this design session with my colleagues in advance of having to conduct one of these meetings right after.  I have chosen to conduct a learning environment modeling session for advertising Blended Learning Strategy Sessions that are conducted by my eLearning Strategy and Program Development colleagues.

As you can see from my agenda, this meeting needs to result in department leaders signing up for a blended learning strategy session.  This includes needing to educate them on the concept, describing what happens during the sessions, and answering any questions that come up about the experience.  I have chosen to include team members that are both directly and indirectly involved with this project in order to ensure I have multiple perspectives during the modeling session.  Regarding LEML, I will focus on group presentation and interactions, while considering the best fit for presenting content.

I look forward to the session and seeing how this can be incorporated.

Designing the Design Space

Designing the Design Space

Brad Griffith - September 13, 2016

How I Constructed My Space

I meet most often with individuals in my office during strategic planning sessions.  I wanted to arrange the space in a way that would allow for collaboration in multiple ways.

I'm fortunate enough to have a large dry erase board in my office that is centered on a wall that has no attached furniture.  I use this for brainstorming and collaboration with my coworkers, but it makes a very good analog canvas for LEM.  You'll notice that I've added an example agenda to the white board.  I think it's great to give people an early idea of how your meeting will go down so that they know what to expect.  I also have dry erase markers and LEM sticky notes available for analog modeling.

My desk has a rounded end where you can see that I have placed a total of three chairs.  I have chosen to put the chairs around the table so that my clients and I can have a shared space to look at any printouts or mark up documents.  All of the chairs in my office are on rollers and can easily be moved away if more space is needed or standing collaboration is warranted.

I think the minimal decorations I have on that wall are actually serving me well by not cluttering the ideation space.  I wonder if this has been an issue or even noticeable for other individuals' design spaces.

I plan on continuing to use this space to conduct strategic planning sessions for individual or small groups of faculty.  This space will not work for groups of more than three people if I had to guess due to the room's spatial limitations and the size of my whiteboard. 

Planning a Learning Environment Design Experience

LEDx for Communicative Foreign Language Teaching
Brad Griffith - September 8, 2016

Awhile back, I created this model based upon what I have previously done to teach foreign language communicatively.  This basically means that language is learned thorough communication that mirrors a normal person's use of the language, specifically contrary to the ineffective approach of teaching a grammar topic and considering it mastery if a student can reproduce it on paper.

As you can see, this model begins with a class discussion led by the facilitator of the previous session's topic, followed by a short quiz with feedback, presentation of a new grammar topic followed by discussion, and a practice opportunity.  I also allowed for peer feedback.  The conclusion of this is an assessment completed independently by the students.

Now that I've learned about LEDx and how to approach this learning environment, my model has changed and, in fact, simplified!

This was a different sort of experience for me since I approached this not only from the learner's perspective, but also from what I knew needed to be accomplished as an instructor considering my method of teaching.  I immediately wanted to give students a lower effective filter in the class by bringing everyone "down a notch" with a new topic at the beginning.   By using the unfamiliar topic that they were to learn that day, students are all unsure and have to search for meaning in the words. This is an improvement on my rather regimented first model.

Students have already received feedback from me on their first impression before I present the actual content that is to be learned.  I also wanted to give students an opportunity to practice independently and recognize what they had missed before having to participate in a group environment.  I envisioned this as continuing to emphasize peer learning, so it's important that there be an element of group practice. 

It's interesting that much of this model requires students to verbally practice because I found it necessary to add a separate discussion element before the final phase to ensure that students and the instructor have a clear set of expectations of what is required in order to demonstrate competency.

Overall, this model is much more focused on the experience of the student than in my previous approach.  I was considering that students had to communicate through speech and writing in order to master nuances of a language, but I think this model accounts for the dynamics of a classroom in a much better way.

Applying the LEDx to BIG Design Challenges

Design Challenge #1:  Office Hours

Brad Griffith - September 8, 2016

I selected the Design Challenge #1: Office Hours because I consider office hours (and often one-on-one meetings in my office) to be prized contact time between learners and instructors.  

Discover - Student and Instructor Needs, Expectations, Goals

Students that visit instructors during office hours usually fall into two categories: they are missing a concept and may express an uncomfortable vulnerability by coming to visit me or they are a highly motivated student that needs additional help in meeting a goal.  This is also the case with my current position in that I help people solve problems or achieve goals. 

Understand - Create a Better Understanding 

I personally underutilized office hours as a student.  Office hours as I have experienced them can fall into a trap of mirroring a lecture that was already done in the classroom where the students don't get a real opportunity for one-on-one practice.  Sometimes resources can be given such as additional problem sets, but the efficacy is debatable. 

Envision - What Should This Become?

I asked myself now what I most wanted out of office hours as a student and as an instructor.  I recall my greatest experiences being those in which my professor was personable, helped me solve a problem, and I came away with a feeling of preparedness, like I had accepted a challenge.  This usually began through informal conversation at the beginning of the meeting.  

As an instructor, this would be the key to helping me to lower the effective filter as soon as possible in meetings with students to really get at why it was taking place and what we needed to accomplish.  

Next is perhaps the most important part.  Instead of the easy way of ending here and just giving the learner some information, it's important to proceed through a practice phase in which the leaner demonstrates competency or understanding of the conversation to the instructor.

This could be as simple as asking someone to repeat what you've just told them or to attempt to solve a mathematical equation. If the problem is, for example, a conflict in the workplace with another employee, this step could be an employee making an attempt at resolving the conflict.

This provides an excellent opportunity for further interaction between learner and facilitator through offering feedback.  This could be either positive reinforcement or corrective, depending on if the attempt was successful or not. 

I can see there is an opportunity here for a feedback loop in that an instructor may have to return to the topic at hand, allow for another practice attempt, and provide another round of feedback on that second attempt. 

In the end, I want to capture the notion of a student accepting a challenge at the end of the meeting. This should be something that allows a student or employee to demonstrate that they have mastered the competency that was dealt with earlier in the learning environment, perhaps requiring communication once more with the facilitator in the form of an assignment or other communication.  This could also come in the form of a student taking an exam.  

Now that I've gotten this far, I would also hope that this entire learning environment as I'm about to form it could form a continuous loop.  All instructors hope that students will repeatedly visit in office hours, not just for the times when they can't master a concept, but also when they are looking to expand their horizons.

Build - Develop the Learning Environment

After going through these first few phases of the LEDx process, it was quite easy to construct this LEM in Lucid Chart.  I think I may have created an innovation loop in this model as well.  

You'll notice on here that I have indicated this is a classroom environment with an online asynchronous evidence block at the end. These are entirely flexible since the initial interaction could be done online through a program like Skype.  Similarly, the follow-up task that I created at the end could be experiential.  

I look forward to hearing your constructive feedback about this model and to see how others approach this challenge.  Thanks for reading!

Different or Similar?

Different or Similar?  LEDx Compared to Other Design Approaches

Brad Griffith

I can vividly remember the first time I had to teach others to do something in a professional environment. I was 17 years old and a senior in high school working at Chili's Grill & Bar when my manager approached me about an opportunity for extra pay conducting new employee orientation on Saturdays.  I agreed quickly!  I had no idea what this experience truly entailed at first, but ended up having to help individuals complete a list of tasks:  complete tax paperwork, study and complete an exam for ServSafe safe food handling certification, and conduct teambuilding exercises to acculturate my new coworkers.  My first classroom experience teaching occurred during graduate school as an instructor for Italian.  In this case, we were first given an exam to ensure we were able to conduct a lecture in Italian, followed by a crash course on how to teach, and then being given a syllabus for the course that instructed us to make it through the first half of a textbook by the end of the semester. 

Both of these initial learning environment experiences have something in common with how I have approached creating learning experiences in the past: I start with the syllabus and work my way backwards.

The first thing I consider is the learning outcome of a particular course:

Next, I consider the possibilities of how to get there.  This usually consists of assessing which assignments will need to be created/graded.  More often than not in the courses I have taught, this is predetermined by having a certain number of exams/papers, or assignments of a specific type that may be departmentally required.

Following the decision of which assignments to require and how they would be structured, I would usually consider how the content would be presented.  I made classic mistakes of putting large chunks of information out there all at once in my early days of teaching.  I have since learned that assignments and content must be presented in chunks.  I notice as well that my early stages of instruction seem boring to me now, for lack of a better word.  I was so concerned about meeting the objective of a course or class session that I sometimes would fail to consider the interactions or how I would be providing feedback to my students as they learn. 

LEDx differs from this approach greatly.  You can probably tell from what I've described above that I never allowed much room for empathy in construction of my learning environments.  I now consider the needs of the people I'm going to be teaching greatly since that tends to be the first barrier that will prevent you from accomplishing the learning objective.  I also tended to just dive right in with constructing content and assignments without gaining a better understanding of how I would communicate their expectations.  It was rare that I would do a prototype or attempt to envision how my course would take place in reality.  There would be some occasions where I would construct a learning environment in Desire2Learn and receive feedback from my students that they couldn't figure out how to proceed.  LEDx has most importantly taught me the value of prototyping and making sure that all of the steps of preparation must be completed in order so that the learning environment is successful. 

Curating BIG Learning Environment Design Challenges

What Makes Designing a Learning Environment so Challenging?

Brad Griffith

September 6, 2016

In my position as a strategic planner for blended learning Sinitiatives, I'm often confronted with challenges that are universal from project to project, department to department.  ILED urges us to consider learning environments as dynamic and complex, both to understand and enhance.  My job is to do both of those things for departments across campus. 

I work in the eLearning division of my university and help departments incorporate blended learning practices into their curriculum.  This revolves around a strategy session in which I have one to two hours to gain an understanding of programs or departments as they currently stand.  This acts as a sort of group consultation wherein I must exercise the skills of empathy in order to understand the needs of my clients, even when they often don't yet know what they need themselves.  The dynamic of being a learning environment designer when you are not the subject-matter expert for the content presents its own unique challenge.

Sometimes in this process, because we discuss blended and online learning, technological skill level is often a great concern.  Learners and facilitators alike must be comfortable enough with technology in learning environments that it doesn't interfere with the learning experience.  This can be just as much of a problem for the facilitator as the learner. 

Why did I think it was a good idea to conditionally release those assignments?!

One of the greatest parts of what I do is to open the eyes of faculty to the needs of their learners in new ways. It seems when we get into discussions of how traditional face to face, synchronous learning environments can be blended into alternative formats, there often arise discussions of content management within the course and overall cognitive load.  It's too easy to fall into a trap of putting too much fluff into a learning environment that inadvertently acts as a distraction for learners.  Streamline the learning process for success!

What is Cognitive Load (CL)?

While it's easy to get caught up in the learning objectives of a course as related to content, I stress the importance of motivation of learners, finding learning gaps, instilling confidence, and ensuring effective interactions, no matter the delivery method of the learning environment.  How do you develop empathy for your the learners in your environment?

Learning Environment Design Challenge Resources:

• Empathy
• Technology Skills (scroll to middle of page):
• Online Learning Skills
• How Students Develop Online Learning Skills:
• Cognitive Load Theory
• Learner Motivation
• Self-Motivated Learning
• Learning Gaps