Campus Technology Insider Podcast March 2022
Listen: From Instructional Design to Learning Experience Design: Understanding the Whole Student
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast! I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
These days, we hear a lot about the "new normal" in higher education. Remote and hybrid learning is here to stay, offering students more flexibility in their learning journeys. But what if the new normal is not enough? According to my guests, it's time to go beyond the new normal and consider the "new possible" — how to put together the best of face-to-face, online and hybrid to create powerful learning experiences based on a deep understanding of the whole student. And that means evolving traditional approaches to instructional design to put the learner at the center of the design process. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke to Mark Milliron, senior vice president of Western Governors University and executive dean of the Teachers College, and Kim Round, academic programs director and associate dean of the Teachers College, about their vision for reimagining education and why learning experience design is essential to student success. Here's our chat.
Mark and Kim, welcome to the podcast.
01:23
Mark Milliron: Thanks, Rhea. Glad to be here.
01:25
Kim Round: So excited, Rhea, to chat with you today. Thanks for having us.
01:30
Kelly: So you both recently wrote an article advocating that it's time for education institutions to embrace learning experience design. And of course, I want to know what that all means. But also in the article, you begin with lessons learned from the pandemic. So I thought that would be a good place to start. How has the pandemic changed the way you think about the higher education student experience?
01:56
Milliron: Yeah I think the one of the things we have to keep in mind around the pandemic is, we've ended up with that kind of a mass conflation, where people have kind of mashed together their experiences with emergency remote learning, with kind of innovative learning, and especially the 20 years of online learning discipline that has been kind of coming together. And it's really unfortunate, because while a lot of really good work has happened — really let's be clear about it, there's some really innovative faculty members who did some great work during the pandemic. But it really was emergency, it was an, and the challenge with that is it's kind of like equating a life raft with a luxury liner: They both float, but they're very different experiences, right? And, and so one of the things we've, we've tried to make clear with learning experience design is this idea that something intentionally designed, especially with the student experience and the learning outcomes deeply in mind, is different than the kind of emergency remote work that we did. And as we vision what's possible on the road ahead, we just can't jump to the idea that oh, everyone found out how bad online learning is. Now we're gonna jump back to it, to the "normal" thing. And we often use the phrasing in our work that it's, you know, there's no going back to normal, new normal is probably not enough, we need to start thinking about what's the new possible. How do we put together the best of kind of face to face, online, hybrid, everything we have at our disposal, to kind of create the kind of powerful learning experiences that make sense. Kim, I know you feel pretty deeply about this. I'll let you go.
03:26
Round: Yeah, I really do. And I think that we knew, in higher ed, that we were making the shift, right? We're making the shift toward more hybrid and online learning models. And institutions were really at different points along that pathway when the pandemic hit. So, and our learners are very discerning now, right? They, they shop online, they, they have entertainment experiences online. So their bar is pretty high, in terms of what they might view as a quality online experience.