Month: September 2020

Another chapter for the 5th edition of the Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology. This is a broad survey chapter about the importance of designing learning environments in a way to nurture the habits and dispositions of creativity in learners. One of the big challenges in writing this chapter was the scope of the topic. Not only does creativity have a deep body of literature in a number of different fields, but it’s thought of very differently, and approached from a very different set of assumptions, across cultures. We chose to address it mostly from the perspective we’re natively familiar with, while also recognizing that there were a number of other ways we could have taken our writing.

To give a sense of how we treated the topic here’s a paragraph from our introduction:

Our discussion is structured as follows: first, we briefly review the literature of creativity, both to describe some attributes that are important to nurture when foster- ing learner creativity, as well as to identify common conditions for promoting cre- ativity in learners. Next, we examine some examples learning environments that foster learner creativity, particularly as related to helping people develop an inte- grated creative identity and not just the acquisition of intellectual or skill-based components of creative action. Third, we discuss implications from the research and examples and offer recommendations for the practice of instructional design and technology, to help designers better address learner creativity through the instruc- tional environments they create.

At Academia.edu

At ResearchGate

At BYU Scholar’s Archive

Reference:

McDonald, J. K., West, R. E., Rich, P. J., & Hokanson, B. (2020). Instructional design for learner creativity. In Bishop, M. J., Boling, E., Elen, J., & Svihla, V. (Eds.), Handbook for research in educational communications and technology(5^th ed., pp. 375-399). Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36119-8_17

This is a design case chapter for the 5th edition of the Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology. The challenge in this chapter was to describe the case honestly, while still being diplomatic and generous to all those involved (needed because the project was not an easy project!). Here’s how we introduced it:

In this case we describe the in-house design and development of an enterprise learn- ing management system (LMS) at Brigham Young University (BYU). The purpose of the project was to replace a commercially available LMS that was becoming too costly as well as unresponsive to the interests of faculty and other stakeholders. In the case we discuss why administrators made the decision to develop a complex piece of software using university resources instead of relying on other commer- cially available products. We also describe their goals for the project and how we attempted to meet those goals by designing the new system on a foundation of exist- ing components and by focusing on the most frequently used functions from the previous LMS. A central feature of our discussion is how we and other participants made decisions in a high-stakes environment of multiple stakeholders and a com- pressed timeline, which had an impact on the emerging design of the product. We also examine some of the challenges that arose among members of the design and development teams during the course of the project as pressure on the team became more intense.

At Academia.edu

At ResearchGate

Reference:

Johnson, M. C., Seawright, L. L., & McDonald, J. K. (2020). A design case of an enterprise-wide learning management system. In Bishop, M. J., Boling, E., Elen, J., & Svihla, V. (Eds.), Handbook for research in educational communications and technology (5^th ed., pp. 675-688). Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36119-8_31