Necessity is...

 Every technology was new once.  This goes for technologies that we use every day—such as microwaves, computers, and traffic lights—to the technology that brought our society to this point—such as compasses, stirrups, and the printing press.  For each of these technological advancements, along with millions of others, there was an inventor and a small group of innovators who were willing to try their wild new invention. 

I…am not one of those types of people.

Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing and hearing about new ideas.  I cheer for others who are bravely and boldly going where no one has yet gone.  As for myself, however, I prefer to wait until there is just a shred more evidence of reliability and credibility.  In other words, I’ll stand on the shore and cheer for the small group trying out there suspicious looking wooden contraption…but I’m not going to get in it myself until I can see that it holds them up and isn’t sinking.  I'm an Early Adopter.

Image courtesy of  https://theboldbusinessexpert.com/2020/11/02/diffusion-of-innovation-getting-past-the-first-wave-of-innovators-and-early-adopters-to-reach-the-tipping-point/

As a teacher, I’ve spent many years designing lessons, activities, and assessments that I feel target my students’ learning needs while also helping them to stay engaged.  I find this challenging and motivating because it draws out my creative side (which otherwise would be left in the dark, slowly and silently crafting half-formed fantasy novel plots while I sleep).  Even though I have fun creating some things, when I employ technology, I want to rely on structure that has been designed by others—even if not many people have discovered it yet. 

One great example of this is the site Blooket.  Blooket uses the gamification learning model created by Kahoot and later enhanced by Quizizz.  However, instead of simply repeating the question-and-answer approach, Blooket employed a new strategy that challenges students to interact with fun (non-educational) mini-games in between question sets.  These mini-games keep students highly engaged and driven to demonstrate their knowledge.  I first found Blooket last year, before it had gained as much attention as it currently has, and tried it out with my students—it was an instant hit! 

I enjoy trying out and embracing new technology that supports the learning of my students, even it means I have to learn new things.  This is what separates me the most from the later stages of the curve, I believe.  Once I learn a technology, I immediately turn to ways that I can share that knowledge.  Individuals who fall in the “Early Majority” benefit from people like me who are early adopters, because they have a more clearly-defined route for how to learn and implement the technology.  Likewise, the “Late Majority” generally begin using the technology due to social or employer pressure, but have strong guides for how to smoothly integrate.  “Laggards”, I feel, always struggle because they are the ones who resist change and only adopt the technology because there were no (or few) other options.

If I transition from the role of a teacher to a learning designer, I do not feel that my place on the curve will change much.  Although I do enjoy creating, I still shy away from the idea of being the one who creates a technology or a even a system that can be considered a technological advancement. I most likely would continue to utilize newly-tested but not-widely-known technology in order to create the best product possible for my customers/clients.

References

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovation. (5th ed.). Free Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmig.2007.07.001

The Making Of A Module

Most adults have participated in an eLearning module at some point—either through a work-mandated training course, as part of a self-paced online curriculum for a certification, or even to pursue personal interests by signing up for free online courses.  We have certain expectations now from these courses, but rarely stop to think about the person/people behind the curtains who are addressing those expectations.  Developing an eLearning module from the ground up during LDT 504 course exposed many of the secrets and struggles of the process.

I would like to note that I found this experience much more difficult than I think I would have if I were not working full-time concurrently (as I am sure many other course participants are as well).  Without having as much time to devote to the material, I found that I was skimming through instructions, skipping past non-essential module blocks, and fast-forwarding through lecture recordings to find essentials.  This ultimately resulted in several unfortunate misunderstandings and mishaps that greatly interfered with the flow of my module’s development.

One of the first obstacles that I encountered while creating this eLearning module came in the planning phase.  I prefer a visual planning style, and if possible, the opportunity to sketch something by hand in my first rough draft.  Usually this will not look like much more than scribbles to anyone else, but it makes sense to me.  However, with the introduction of the Twine wireframe tool, I was scrambling to understand how its new features worked and how to input the large bulk of information required.  I didn’t sketch it out for myself because I had no idea what the tool I was using would end up looking like and relied only on how it was coming together on the screen.  I also felt overwhelmed that I needed to dump so much into each of the pieces I added to the wireframe.  Even with a liberal amount of copy-paste to keep formatting consistent, it still felt tedious and frustrating.  As a person who does not usually plan out every fastidious detail prior to execution of anything, that step was probably the worst for me.

Despite feeling behind and overwhelmed for most of this course, there were some parts that I genuinely enjoyed.  I am a creator at heart, and I have a rudimentary understanding of how coding works (although the only coding language I’ve learned has very limited applications).  This helped me to understand concepts in Articulate 360 like “states”, “variables” and “triggers” quicker.  As I began adding in more of the required slides, I started to feel curious about trying new things with the program.  Some triggers that I spent some time on ended up duplicating a feature that was already part of the interface, such as the play/pause button, so I didn’t keep them.  Others, like disabling the “next” button until a certain trigger, I did keep.  I also felt like if I’d had more time with the program while working on the final part of the project (not during the early stages when I was just trying to keep up), I would have experimented with many more strategies.  To provide an example—when I work with the program Desmos (an online website for creating activities), I can spend hours on tasks like choosing which parts of a screen appear or disappear depending on correct/incorrect answers, buttons that cause hints to appear when pressed, screens that reveal answers to previous work but only after work has been completed, graphs that can judge their own correctness, and so on.  I would have liked to explore to that level of detail with this program and then submit a product that demonstrated those types of strategies.

While I am glad that some of the key resources were provided for the design case, there was still much confusion when I launched the project—namely over the comment that I would “receive an email” which actually referred to a faux email included in the design case notes themselves.  I also spent an inordinate amount of time researching a topic that I was definitely NOT a subject matter expert on.  I assume that these three design cases were prepared because it is easier to grade on a rubric; however, if that is not the driving reason behind the choice, I believe that offering students the option to choose their own topic (but provide a limit to branches in the module) would be a great support.  For example, since I am a math teacher, if I’d been able to develop this module about methods for Polynomial Division, I would have been able to gather the materials much quicker and therefore spend more time developing the module features.  I already have many images and examples, and I can speak confidently about each method.  I would also feel comfortable developing assessment questions that accurately match objectives and are appropriate for the audience. 

        Looking to the future, I know that generative AI will come to play a significant role in the development of eLearning modules.  I foresee human-made programs that employ generative AI where a person inputs key details such as course objectives, audience demographics, module style, assessment style, and module length; then the module is designed to match these characteristics and passed back to the designer for editing in order to ensure that all goals are met.  While this is fascinating from a pragmatic standpoint (yay!  Less work!) I think I am more excited about the prospect of virtual reality or at least augmented reality modules.  Just think—Pokémon Go! meets “Safety in the Workplace Refresher Training”—in my mind I am seeing people using their devices to roam around (in a safe way) and “catch” AR cartoons of workers doing something dangerous.  I just hope that the people who make those eLearning modules don’t make them boring…