Instructional Design Guide

What is "Learning Centered"?

Learning-centered instruction is the causing and measuring of cognitive behaviors.

Initial need and demand is documented for content-relevant cognitive skills. Before enrolling, learners know what skills they will own after the course. Learning-centered instruction is consequence-based behavior change that requires both the evident outcomes planning and execution components.

Basically:

• student completion of cognitive skills is the reason "why" we teach,
• content knowledge topics and issues are "what" we teach, and
• instructional delivery methods and processes are "how" we teach

What is "Learn2Learn"?

Learn2Learn is enabling learner success beyond the classroom. It usually includes the methods and resources students can use after leaving the course.

How do your students continue to learn your discipline after leaving your course? Making Learn2Learn a necessary goal for your course will assist development of some learner outcomes.

What are Cognitive Skills?

Cognitive skills (listed below) are the basis for learning outcomes. They form the "knowledge process hierarchy" (from Bloom’s Taxonomy). These abilities are in order of highest (Evaluation) to lowest (Knowledge) "level" or order of complexity and difficulty.

Postsecondary education can raise the cognitive skill level in most content areas.

• Evaluation
  Exercise choice based on below skills, verify value of evidence and recognize subjectivity. The most complex cognitive skill.
• Synthesis
  Combine parts to form a new whole, use old ideas to create new ones.
• Analysis
  Ability to divide concept into important points.
• Application
  Take comprehended information and apply it to other things.
• Comprehension
  Translate or interpret information based on knowledge.
• Knowledge
  Acquisition of facts, remembering materials, memory. Knowledge is the basic cognitive skill level and the foundation for higher level behaviors. You can, with additional effort however, assess cognitive skills above Comprehension.

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Using Action Verbs to Help Write Learning-Centered Outcomes

Learning outcomes are written for each primary discipline skill that will be assessed at the required cognitive skill level.

(E)valuation, (S)ynthesis, Anal(Y)sis, (A)pplication, (C)omprehension, (K)nowledge

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What are Best Knowledge-Enhancement Activities?

The best knowledge-enhancement learning activities are measured against our most basic ability to remember. This graph shows how various learning activities effect memory enhancement.

Are you using best learning practices or are you giving ‘em the same ol’ lecture?

If you want students to forget 95% of the information you think is important, deliver it to them by lecturing. Otherwise, you might want to try other means. One minute of practice, for instance, is equal to twenty minutes of lecture.

• 90% - Immediately apply knowledge in a real situation (teach)
• 75% - Practice by doing
• 50% - Participate in a small group discussion
• 30% - View a demonstration
• 20% - Listen to audio and watch video
• 10% - Read
• 5% - Listen to a lecture

Numbers are from National Training Laboratories, Bethel, Maine

What is Critical Thinking?

When learners are able to evaluate, synthesize and analyze ideas they are able to think more precisely, inventively and discriminatingly. Critical thought can be the practice of higher order cognitive skills.

An idea, system or assembly can be separated into parts, combined with different part associations and appraised for multiple effects.

Inquiry using divergent questions that include higher level cognitive behaviors can assist critical thinking.

What is Assessment?

Throughout history, knowledge by itself has been highly valued. It usually equates with internal, or referenced external, memory. Knowledge is implied within our cognitive behaviors. Today, however, owning higher-level cognitive skills (the ability to make complex knowledge associations) is considered to be more valuable than our memory alone.

Written tests usually measure knowledge or comprehension as memorized facts. Assessment, however, verifies learning outcome achievement. It determines whether or not a specified behavior exists. It can also insure that cognitive skills are appropriately and impartially demonstrated. Benefits of assessment are directly related to the quality of each outcome's initial specification.

To develop student abilities, faculty now need to be both discipline knowledge (content) experts, as well as, behavior planning and assessment experts.

Inventing and developing tools and processes to measure relevant cognitive skills also require greater faculty creativity and ingenuity.

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What is a Course Outline?

The outline is a dynamic course guide. The outline establishes course learning requirements, sustains course quality, affirms minimum course standards and present the knowledge required to produce the minimum outcome behaviors that will be owned by each student after the course.

Faculty come and go with individually owned syllabi and delivery processes. The outline endures as part of a curriculum process that defines exactly what the institution offers students.

The OUTLINE (OUTCOME GUIDE) usually includes the following minimum components:

• COURSE IDENTIFICATION
• DESCRIPTION (what the learner will be able to do after the course)
• PREREQUISITES
• OTHER (institution requirements)
• OUTCOMES (cognitive skills)
• CONTENT (discipline knowledge)
• UNIFORM ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

The outline lists the minimum course requirements. Important delivery and course design information not covered in the outline is usually included in the syllabus and open to academic freedom of individual faculty.

Until recently most institutions haven’t considered the outline to be a promotional document. It has been discovered that the outline is used by Counseling and other student services to describe courses to potential students. The learning-centered outline can be the only course document that potential students will see before the course. It can be used to promote courses to a great extent.

Because outlines can have an agreement in them between the instructor or institution and the student, like "After successful completion of this course, the learner will be able to: … ", institutions can guarantee behaviors that each learner will own after the course.

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What is a Syllabus?

The traditional syllabus was a teaching plan. It defined how the course was to be instructed, was usually based on a textbook and was not meant for student use.

The learning-centered syllabus of today is a learning plan that includes everything the student requires for success in the discipline after the course. It includes learning activities, the learning-centered outline and learning-centered delivery strategies.

The course syllabus is where the instructor brings the course alive! It injects instructional creativity, innovative instructional strategies and directed accountability into the course.

Minimum syllabus components are:

1. course outline
2. session agendas with outcomes for specified time frames or scheduled learning activities
3. institution and course policies
4. outcome assessments
5. instructor contact data with email address, office hours, etc.
6. resources (community, human, digital, paper, etc.) and associated expenses
7. … and everything else promoting greatest student success (after the course) with necessary effectiveness.

The syllabus is updated often as improved learning strategies become evident.

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