Reflections
We took another moment to reflect at the conclusion of our Design phase, which was especially helpful in consolidating all that we had learned so far (including the Analysis phase). Below are some of those thoughts.
Team Reflections
Thoughts on the Design Phase
What were we each thinking and reflecting on as our Design phase came to a close?
Moving forward, it is very meaningful to walk through the initial design process together within the team. The aha moment can be that each of us had different thoughts regarding the initial design, however, after discussing together, we found that each of us has our own valuable thoughts, and it’s not that paradoxical or difficult that we combine our ideas together to form an overall idea.
The biggest difficulty currently can be that it’s still not very clear what should be included exactly inside each course unit and set, and what the detailed version is like. More efforts should be made to explore more about the content details and the finalized version of the product.
Zora
This time around, it was especially beneficial that everyone on our team was aligned in terms of achieving our set learning goals and objectives, where we all mostly differed was the lens in which we focused on different parts of the learning experience. Our ultimate hopes, or long-term goals, were to enable users to feel competent and confident in their skills and knowledge as an investor. Ultimately our differing viewpoints ended up working to our benefit, because we were able to pull ideas from each member of the team to incorporate in the design of our final learning solution.
I think that with these milestones we were able to leverage each team members’ unique eye to integrate into a final solution that I believe will be engaging, personalized, and useful. Because many of these milestones focused on divergent thinking we were able to bring in everyone’s ideas and then build upon them in order to make them more relevant and more feasible as it relates to our project.
Deja
After what felt like a very “by-the-book” scientific approach to collecting and analyzing data in the Analysis phase, our most recent Design phase felt like a tremendously creative one! In addition to allowing us to indulge in our creativity during the divergent ideation phase, the process made me realize how valuable instructional designers can be to organizations in the sense that we are, at the same time, researchers/social scientists/creatives/artists/teachers/managers. The term “designer” is probably the closest catch-all title that best encapsulates all of this, but even that still falls short of the full picture of what an instructional designer truly is or does.
This phase was very helpful in teaching me how to ground my claims in both theory and evidence. Being able to connect what the literature to what we learned from our research was not only very useful, it was also thought-provoking and the cause for many “aha” moments (unfortunately since-forgotten). As we head into the prototyping phase, I feel that our project is very strongly grounded and has a strong “flow” from one phase to the next.
Iron
Min
I think the insights we draw from previous analysis really sets a good direction and framework for our design phrase, especially goal & objectives and different types of gaps we need to address. Therefore when I was brainstorming early ideas, I was very conscious of making sure to hit every point.
Besides, it is also important to make connections to learning theories and methods to strongly back up learning designs. I found the collaborative class websites for these resources super helpful to take reference and sometimes these back-ups can really direct me to attend to small pieces in the design and deliberate on every choice I make for the learners.
One thing that keeps me pondering is that personalized learning has already been a “buzz word” in learning design and its advantages are obvious in many aspects. Our team also tries to achieve this goal by using a pre-test on learners’ prior knowledge to locate accurate starting points for every learner and laying out differentiated learning journeys. However, except for prior knowledge, which tends to be a basic one, questions like what other factors/criteria in the framework should be considered for achieving “personalized learning” and how to adjust learning modules/learning routes accordingly should be kept thinking with the progress of our project.
Reflection is proven to be an effective practice to learn from past designer experience, so future design experiences are optimized.
Lachheb & Boling, 2021