Using Design Thinking and Formative Assessment to Create an Experience Economy in Online Classrooms

Abstract

Being faced with the recent need to rapidly (and with little notice) move from teaching face-to-face (f2f) to an online environment, instructional designers and instructors have been confronted with the need to learn quickly how to more ambitiously approach combining course subject matter with the most effective means to engage with and immerse students in that content. Traditionally, when designing f2f courses, instructors would supplement/enhance their course materials with social experiences at the moment they conducted their classes. The idea of crafting or curating engagement and immersive classroom practices and activities was often viewed as a separate, add-on instructional process. Until recently, most online courses were restricted by the state university boards definition of an online courses and were viewed as mainly asynchronous events, meaning it was up to the student to create their own individual experiences. While those restrictions have been relaxed, those who were recently faced with having to move from face to face to an online modality simply digitizing the content because they had little time and/or little background in understanding how to integrate lived experiences, simulating the social event that occurred in their f2f delivery. The literature, as well as many instructional design textbooks, are full of examples that identify the need to co-create in an online environment content that is simultaneously embellished with immersive and engaging social experiences. We like many instructional technologists, have been trying to teach our teachers and instructors how to design instruction that is applicable for the online environment. Having participated in and observed others’ struggles to be forced to rapidly move content online over the past year and a half, the authors became motivated to update a series of research studies on social and cognitive engagement in online learning that they had been conducting for more than a decade. An unintended consequence of the analysis of the various attempts we had made to overcome the perceived immediacy and socialization shortcomings in our own courses was that we were able to study the impact that the actual transactions that occurred between us as instructors and our learners. We discovered that what was most often overlooked was the fact that, while our students continually see to push for more distance or online learning, their perception of and preference for distance learning did not reduce their human need to be interconnected. Perhaps it was the forced social distancing required by the pandemic that made this more obvious. But it became very apparent that what is now especially needed to be included in our course designs are the complex constructs that create immediate, inter-personal relationships between individuals, even (and especially) in the virtual classroom to connect learners and teachers on a social, psychological and cognitive plane –to create that missing sense of place that Meyrowitz No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior (Meyrowitz, 1985) once longed for. A major goal of this formative, personal study, then, is to provide some indication as to the significant, deleterious impacts on the dispositions towards learning that can occur when any one or more of these three characteristics is missing.in the development of classroom experiences, regardless of modality. The theoretical basis of this perspective follows the National Education Association (NEA) report “Preparing 21^st Century Students for a Global Society” (National Education Association, 2012), that suggests that all course design needs to focus on what they refer to as the Four C’s: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.