This week’s readings dug a little deeper in terms of instructional design and what designers should being keeping in mind when doing so. Crichton and Carter (2017) mention how the mindset of the student is extremely important and reference the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s suggestions on the factors that learning environments should incorporate. They are that learning environments need to be 1) learner-centred, 2) structured and well-designed, 3) profoundly personalized, 4) inclusive, and 5) social (p. 18). These factors in my mind are straightforward and build upon what I know previously to be aspects to what a successful learning environment (whether it be online or not) should look like. The introduction of empathic design by Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, and Koskinen (2014) on the other hand throws me a curveball.
As a researcher I should be quite comfortable with learning theories. In reality though, I feel most grounded with concepts that can be practically seen. The ideas behind problem-based learning or inquiry-based learning have the core concept of trying to find a solution to a problem. Simple enough. Empathic design looks at human behaviour and tries to map learning to those actions (at least in my understanding). Through the reading I realize that it is much more complicated than that. “Empathic designers studied how people make sense of emotions, talk about them, and share them” (Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, & Koskinen, 2014, p. 68). Perhaps it is the abstract nature of empathic design that eludes me. I recognize that everyone is different and personalized learning leads to successful learning (as mentioned above). Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, and Koskinen talk a lot about the research into empathic design, but I guess I would like to see a practical example of how it is incorporated. I feel empathic design is always at the back of our minds when we think about learning environments, but to put my finger down on an aspect that is clearly empathy influenced is a challenge that I need to overcome.
References
Crichton, S. & Carter, D. (2017). Taking Making into Classrooms Toolkit. Open School/ITA.
Mattelmäki, T., Vaajakallio, K., & Koskinen, I. (2014). What happened to empathic design?. Design Issues, 30(1), 67-77.
George,
Thanks for your comments and your statement “I feel empathic design is always at the back of our minds when we think about learning environments, but to put my finger down on an aspect that is clearly empathy influenced is a challenge that I need to overcome.” In my experience as a designer of learning environments, the shift in recent thinking is the intentionality of moving empathy from the back of our minds to the forefront. Considerations of how to make it the starting point are the interesting innovation now.
Thanks for your comment Susan. I’ve really had to change the way I think towards ID. Empathy definitely wasn’t at the forefront before, but for me as someone not involved in the ID process it can be easily overlooked. Now I find there can even be opportunity to incorporate empathy in the evaluative process. Definitely something to think about…