Jason K McDonald

I’m a member of an interdisciplinary research group at BYU, studying a type of instructional simulation we call a playable case study. This has been a very fruitful line of research, resulting in publications about the simulations themselves as well as using the simulation design process as a window into some fundamental issues about design itself. This article belongs to the former category, studying student perceptions after using a playable case study in a university course.

Abstract:

In this paper we introduce an approach to cybersecurity education and helping students develop professional understanding in the form of a Playable Case Study (PCS), a form of educational simulation that draws on affordances of the broader educational simulation genre, case study instruction, and educational Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs). A PCS is an interactive simulation that allows students to “play” through an authentic scenario (case study) as a member of a professional team. We report our findings over a multi-year study of a PCS called Cybermatics, with data from 111 students from two different U.S. universities who interacted with the PCS. Cybermatics increased student understanding about certain key aspects of professional cyberse- curity work, improved their confidence in being able to successfully apply certain skills associated with cybersecurity, and increased about half of the students’ interest in pursuing a cybersecurity career. Students also reported a number of reasons why their perceptions changed in these areas (both positive and negative). We also discuss design tensions we experienced in our process that might be encountered by others when creating simulations like a PCS, as they attempt to balance the authenticity of designed learning experiences while also sufficiently scaffolding them for newcomers who have little background in a discipline.

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Read-only copy of article

Reference:

Giboney, J. S., McDonald, J. K. J. K., Balzotti, J., Hansen, D. L. D. L., Winters, D. M. D. M., & Bonsignore, E. (2021). Increasing cybersecurity career interest through playable case studies. TechTrends, 65(4), 496–510. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-021-00585-w

I give all the credit for this publication to my co-author, BYU MS student Amy Rogers. She was looking at data I’d collected about instructional design teams and noticed an interesting trajectory one of the students experienced. Applying some close reading techniques we were able to develop it into this case study of authentic projects (internships, work assignments, etc.) in instructional design education.

Abstract:

This paper examines how authentic project experiences matter to instructional design students. We explored this through a single case study of an instructional design student (referred to as Abby) who participated as a member of an educational simulation design team at a university in the western United States. Our data consisted of interviews with Abby that we analyzed to understand how she depicted her participation in this authentic project. In general, Abby found her project involvement to open up both possibilities and constraints. Early in her involvement, when she encountered limitations she did not expect, those constraints showed up as most significant and she saw the project as a place of disenfranchisement that highlighted her inadequacies. Later, in conjunction with changes in the project structure and help from a supportive mentor, she reoriented to the possibilities her participation made available, all of which disrupted the cycle of disenfranchisement in which she seemed to be caught. Abby saw more clearly opportunities that had previously been obscured, and she became one of the project’s valued leaders. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for understanding how authentic project experiences can fit into instructional design education.

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Reference:

McDonald, J. K.  & Rogers, A. (2021). “I Can Do Things Because I Feel Valuable”: Authentic Project Experiences and How They Matter to Instructional Design Students. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 10(2). https://edtechbooks.org/jaid_10_2/i_can_do_things_beca

This is another article out of my lengthy study of critiques in the design studio. This one built a picture of critiques as being primarily under students’ control, something that helped them build a life that mattered to them, rather than primarily being a pedagogical technique or tool of enculturation. I was completely impressed with the six students we interviewed for this study. All of them were articulate, bright, and absolutely committed to being skilled professionals in their fields of study. Even the way they carried themselves pointed towards the conclusions we drew in this study. I’m proud of this article and think the discussion is some of the more important points I’ve made in scholarship.

Abstract:

In this article we consider critiques within the design studio as how students press forward into possible forms of the self that are opened up through studio participation. We contrast this with a view of critiques as primarily being a pedagogical or socialising technique under the control of instructors and other critics. We carried out our inquiry using interviews with six studio students, studying how they depict critiques and how they depict themselves when being critiqued. Students’ depictions of critiques included their being: a) signal in the noise; b) windows into their critics’ character; c) a type of text to be interpreted. Their depictions of themselves included being: a) clear-sighted; b) street-smart; c) creative. We conclude by discussing what these depictions might mean about how instructors/critics can frame critiques in ways that facilitate students using them to take up possibilities that are opened up through studio participation.

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Reference:

McDonald, J. K., & Michela, E. (2020). ‘This is my vision’: How students depict critiques along with themselves during critiques. Journal of Design Research, 18(1/2), 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1504/JDR.2020.10033227

I wrote this design case based partially on my thesis research from 2002-2003, and original research conducted earlier this year. One of the reasons I wrote it was because I’m getting more interested in the design knowledge that can be communicated through means like design cases. And I used this chapter as a chance to explore this further: how far can we go in generating real and unique forms of knowledge in a design case, that make a meaningful contribution towards designers’ practical judgments? In particular, what does it really look like when theory has been intentionally and rationally applied to a design? I couldn’t think of a better example to illustrate this than the work of B. F. Skinner. Even though I don’t endorse teaching machines as an educational technology, it’s hard to deny that Skinner was one of the better examples the field has produced about how to operationalize theory. And while the purpose of a design case isn’t to pass judgment on the design (so I didn’t discuss this in the chapter directly), I think one of the lessons we learn from Skinner is that using theory as an explicit guide to practice creates some real difficulties. Designs may be theoretically pure, but functionally inelegant or even counter-productive. That’s one of major lessons of the teaching machine movement, at least for me.

As I said in my chapter introduction:

This design case describes B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine, an educational tech- nology developed in the mid-twentieth century, commonly viewed as a precur- sor to later innovations such as computer-based instruction (Niemiec & Walberg, 1989) and eLearning (McDonald et al., 2005).The value of this case is not only as historical precedent, however. Although it does provide insight into the design of later approaches, Skinner’s device was only one antecedent of modern educa- tional technologies, and, in fact, was not even the first mechanical apparatus that could be referred to as a teaching machine (Benjamin Jr., 1988). An additional benefit of the case, then, is found by examining how Skinner made design deci- sions to intentionally apply his behavioral theory of operant conditioning in the development of his machine. Even today, despite how Skinner and his behaviorist approaches have fallen out of favor, his work is still an important illustration of how a psychological theory has been operationalized for practical implementation in a specific technology.

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Reference:

McDonald, J. K. (2021). The Skinnerian teaching machine (1953-1968). In Boling, E., Gray, C. M., Howard, C. D. , & Baaki, J.(Eds.), Historical instructional design cases: ID knowledge in context and practice (pp. 85-103). Routledge.

This is an article with colleagues Jill Stefaniak from the University of Georgia and Rebecca Reese from the Colorado School of Mines. Our purpose was to capture some of the practical wisdom that we’ve developed about teaching instructional design in different contexts. There’s more than there’s a difference between schooling and practice. There’s also a difference between schooling and particular types of practice. That diversity is what we were drawing attention to in this article, along with some suggestions for coping in various kinds of situations.

Abstract:

Research indicates there is a gap between employers’ expectations of instructional designers’ roles and responsibilities, and what designers actually do. The purpose of this paper is to explore the unique nuances inherent in instructional design practices from a variety of work settings. Our paper is grounded in a practitioner’s perspective utilizing long-standing careers in the instructional design sectors and informal discussions with many practitioners. The goal of the paper is to highlight constraints and contextual considerations that instructional designers must address while working on projects. We also discuss how instructional design educators can support instructional design students to better prepare them for real-world instructional design contexts.

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At the journal website

Reference:

Stefaniak, J., Reese, R. M., & McDonald, J. K. (2020). Design considerations for bridging the gap between instructional design pedagogy and practice. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 9(3). https://edtechbooks.org/jaid_9_3/instructional_design_pedagogy

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.

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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.

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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

This is another chapter led by a Master’s student. It also comes out of the same study that led to our paper The Design Critique and the Moral Goods of Studio Pedagogy. In this chapter we focused on the relationships that developed between one student and the faculty she worked with, tracing the changes in the students’ abilities and confidence as she worked closely with her faculty mentors.

Abstract:

In this study, the critique is studied from the perspective of how, as an instructor- student interaction, it can influence the learning experience beyond only the acquisi- tion of course content knowledge. While this, in and of itself, is not a new insight, we assert that viewing the critique in this way can help clarify how the phenomenon can be shaped by instructors to help benefit their students’ development and growth. Studio critiques create opportunities for teachers to interact with students in an intensely focused manner. As we have researched this process in a university-level studio course, we have seen that an implication of this type of engagement is the opportunity critiques can provide instructors to build positive relationships with their students. Instead of provoking fear or dread in students (as is sometimes con- cluded), critiques may, in fact, provide a unique opportunity for instructors to sup- port students in developing dispositions that will be necessary as a foundation for their professional identities. In this chapter, we explore one particular example of this possibility by examining the experience of a student enrolled in an interdisci- plinary, entrepreneurship, studio course. We focus our inquiry into her experience by asking the questions: How did one female undergraduate describe her experi- ence being critiqued in a studio-style, interdisciplinary, entrepreneurship course? And what does her experience suggest about using critique as a method to influence student development of attributes other than learning the content knowledge of a discipline?

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Reference:

Michela, E., & McDonald, J. K. (2020). Relationships, feedback, and student growth in the design studio: A case study. In Hokanson, B., Clinton, G., Tawfik, A. A., Grincewicz, A., & Schmidt, M. (Eds.), Educational technology beyond content: A new focus for learning (pp. 183-192). Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37254-5_16

This is a chapter led by a Master’s student of mine, and contributed to by a number of members of an interdisciplinary team I work with at BYU. The student leading the chapter was interested in helping underrepresented populations (especially women) have more opportunities in STEM education, and this chapter looks at how the one of the simulations we designed can improve students’ attitudes towards topics and skills that are often seen as being too difficult.

Abstract:

In this chapter we examine how knowledge- and skill-based learning might be integrated with broader views of learning that also account for changes in percep- tions of the discipline and attitudes toward professional practice. We do so by reporting our work on a mixed-reality educational simulation that we call a Playable Case Study (PCS). First, we describe the elements that define a PCS. Next, we describe a specific PCS designed to introduce students to the field of cyberse- curity and report survey data from a recent pilot study that illustrates the types of attitudinal- and skill-based learning this type of simulation might encourage. Finally, we describe insights we gained from our findings about how the PCS simulation could further facilitate students’ learning more than only the knowledge or factual components of a discipline.

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Reference:

Winters, D. M., McDonald, J. K., Hansen, D. L., Johnson, T. W. Balzotti, J., Bonsignore, E., & Giboney, J. S. (2020). The playable case study: An online simulation for skill and attitudinal learning. In Hokanson, B., Clinton, G., Tawfik, A. A., Grincewicz, A., & Schmidt, M. (Eds.), Educational technology beyond content: A new focus for learning (pp. 127-140). Springer Nature Switzerland AG. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37254-5_11