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Thinking Like a Designer (How Do We Teach That?)

By Lauren Marsh

Students and teachers appreciate the efficiencies that digital tools bring to the classroom, including prompt responses to questions via e-mail and easy access to materials offered by online course sites. But is this the most that we can expect from the digital revolution-never having to say, "I'm sorry for losing a syllabus?" Not according to Simon Hooper.

As a professor of curriculum and instruction, Hooper teaches courses that explore how new media can promote learning. A few years ago when he set out to redesign an introductory course about designing learning experiences using Flash animation software, Hooper started with the question "What does a good course look like?" He knew what it didn't look like: delivering information to a class full of students who would passively repeat it back to him in class or on a test. Hooper believes that all learning builds upon experience. Learning requires students to be active and engaged and build upon a foundation of what they already know. Without that foundation, learning can't take place. "The implication is that you've got to have a vast array of experiences. One of the problems we have in education is we've got some people who've got really rich experiences and we've got other people who have impoverished experiences." He set out to "create loads of experiences" for his students using classroom technologies.

Together with Charlie Miller, a doctoral candidate in curriculum and instruction, Hooper designed a series of online modules that created structured experiences through which students could build their knowledge and skills. Hooper and Miller identified a number of objects-an alarm clock, a cell phone, an iPod-and recreated their look and functionality using Flash animation software. Within each module students progressed through levels that required mastery of increasingly sophisticated skills. Clustering skills within each module helped students to assess their own level of expertise and to establish learning goals for themselves.

By reproducing the objects in each module, students built a common vocabulary and skill set. Building skills was only a starting point. By adding functionality to each object-for example, turning an animated alarm clock into a clock radio-students engaged in problem solving around design issues. For final projects students were required to create their own learning modules, complete with instructions and organized according to different levels of expertise. Upon completing the final assignment students not only demonstrated their competence with Flash, they demonstrated that they were thinking like designers. Taking digital tools into their own hands gave students the opportunity to reflect upon the design process and on their own learning process, and to create something wholly their own.

Redesigning and integrating digital technology into his class also made Hooper more appreciative of resources available to him. Hooper took advantage of funding available to faculty members interested in redesigning courses and adopting digital innovations. But he points out that his most important resource is the cohort of faculty members and students he relies on to help generate and flesh out ideas. When he and Miller challenged themselves to imagine "a really good course," they initiated a "process of talking and discussing and arguing and coming up with different ideas. We kept challenging each other and then we'd start writing stuff down. And we started coming up with ideas we never realized we were going to come up with. We found this to be a fabulous research process; definitely not something we could have done on our own."

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Last modified Tuesday, 19-Jun-2007 15:33:24 CDT