Our learning experience as a system
How are you conceiving of the learning experience as a system and what facet(s) do you aim to realize as a first step?
In order to start seeing the various components and objectives of our learning experience come together as a working system, we first revisited many of the mapping exercises we did early on with a bit more clarity and intention. We started off by looking at our primary three stakeholder groups, college students, parents, and educators, this time around narrowing down their hopes/aspirations and fears/concerns based on the more specific goals and parameters we have been defining over the last few weeks. We highlighted a few connection points between the three stakeholder groups (conflicting parent-student expectations & joint student-educator learning experiences) that we might want to revisit as we really consider who can and should be our target audience.
From doing this the second time around, we were able to narrow down to the aspects of each stakeholder group that we want to dedicate more attention to (whereas our initial stakeholder map tried to cover as much as possible). It also served to remind us of the relationships between stakeholder groups and the shared or contradictory hopes or fears that we had kind of set aside while focusing on isolated stakeholders.
We then revisited our learning gaps diagram, focusing more on the tags (knowledge, motivation, etc) identified the first time around, in hopes that this would help us design more intentionally based on the type of gaps we are trying to address. This helped us to ground our ideas in more specific challenges (since our core challenge is a bit broad and can easily send us down rabbit holes) and also helped us see how those states have evolved in the last few weeks. In addition, putting more emphasis on the tags allowed us to be more targeted with the objectives of each part of the experience, as we detail more through our 4MAT, structured flow of goals, and timeline. We think adding these same tags to our learning goals and tasks will be really helpful later on.
Next, we identified a few contexts for our learning experience to occur based on the ideas we have developed thus far.
To start to get a clearer, more wholistic picture of our learning experience, we took one more stab at the 4MAT system diagram, began breaking down our short term and long term goals, and affinity mapped them onto a linear timeline. Through these three mapping activities, the overarching structure of our learning experience started to become a lot clearer (though the form is still to be determined).
In our structured flow of goals diagram, we reiterated our overarching goals first, and then moved downwards into more short-term, specific, and measurable objectives. By doing so, we started see a clearer sequence and method of scaffolding emerge, moving from past to present and future, and from conversation to reflection to action.
In the timeline we created below, we got a bit more specific with some of the concrete activities and goals of the experience from start to finish. As it stands right now, we are considering incorporating reflection on past failures and successes at the start of the experience, easing learners in through scaffolded prompts (such as working up from funny, everyday “fails” to personal failures). Once our learners have an understanding of their personal definitions of success and failure, we want to work up to applying lessons learned in past failures to the present and future, with activities aimed at celebrating smaller moments of progress and risk taking, both independently and collaboratively. We have also incorporated three moments of “active failing” at the beginning, middle, and end, in which learners would be set up to fail at a task, so to speak, in order to learn some of these abstract concepts through application. We’re hoping as the form of our experiences becomes clearer, the active components and specific activities or prompts will also start to make more sense as parts of a system, rather than isolated lessons.
In class, we took our timeline back to the structured goals diagram in order to refine the sequencing of our overarching goals, the transitions between each phase, and starting points for intervention. In doing so, we began to see a framework emerge that could combine the structuring of goals with the magic circle in a chronological manner. Thus far, we’ve identified some starting points for development (darker yellow post its) across the bigger arcs or phases in order to show the progression we want our learners to go through without having to design each and every step. Some of the key facets include prompting learners to describe their current approach to failure and success, then having them challenge their assumptions (similarly to how we did in the blockbusting activities), trade roles with someone else, and finally some way of bringing the experience back full circle and applying these new definitions of failure and success to present and future challenges. Moving forward, we want to continue brainstorming forms that these intervention points might take and how some of our early ideas might be adapted or combined into this emerging framework.
Below is an initial high level draft of our framework that we also hope to continue developing in tangent to our ideas.
