Designing for Learners and Learning

A key aspect of designing for learners and learning is truly developing an understanding of the learners: their wants, needs, and interests. Additionally, knowing how your learners behave within the context for which you're designing. For the Know Before You Throw project, was one piece of designing for learners we kept returning to and realizing we didn't know enough about. We had an idea of what our learners enjoyed and were interested in; however, those things changed depending on the context. In my second semester project (Digital Museum Tour Guides), I used this insight to guide my ideation process. By spending time talking to learners specifically about their experiences in a number of museums I was able to gain a better understanding of what my learners appreciated and needed as they explored.

Supporting learners in making personal and emotional connections is a key aspect of my approach to designing effective learning experiences. Early on in the Digital Museum Tour Guides project, I realized that the path I was taking lent itself to emphasizing personal and emotional connections. As a result, I intentionally made design decisions that would allow me to highlight those for my target learners. By doing so, I aimed to create an immersive and meaningful learning journey that resonated deeply with learners.

Learning requires reflection and generative processing (but this can often be left out of learning designs). In our digital technologies courses, we saw this time and time again where learners had the chance to experience amazing things, but didn't have the opportunity to pull things together and make sense of them. This observation guided my decision to include explicit opportunities for reflection in the Digital Museum Tour Guides project.

When designing for learning, the learning objectives should be clear and constantly revisited. The design decisions we make should connect directly to the learning objectives. This was a realization I had twice, once while working on the Know Before You Throw game and then again when reflecting on work done for my Entrepreneurship Game. Having clearer learning goals and intentionally revisiting them provides a clear focus for the design decisions made throughout the design process.