As a graduate student in Georgetown University’s “Learning and Design” MA program, I was tasked with identifying a learning challenge for a given client, and then designing a learning engagement to assist a given learning population.
I connected with the Veteran’s Office at Georgetown University. What started as a learning engagement focused on “Education Benefits” evolved into an effort to help the Veteran’s Office develop programmatic capacity to design and deliver online workshops tailored to military-connected students.
Design & Development
Time spent doing design research. Interviewed a bunch of people, thinking evolved as I employed design tools to better understand the most relevant problem and how a learning engagement might help. Mind- mapping, affinity-mapping, User-Personas, and Rapid User-Feedback. State the design problem.
(Paragraph summing up the design ethos and relevant learning theories. CEE Model. Connectivism. Concept of the think/pair/share, making it digital and digitally available.
Initial structure was to run both in-person and online workshops, as envisioned by this early iteration of a design document. But as we worked through this idea with stakeholders, we decided to simplify into three online workshops delivered via Zoom, with context for the workshops situated in a Canvas Course.
Results & Lessons Learned
What happened with the workshops? What takeaways did the Veteran’s Office have as a client? Whose learning was evaluated, how, and what story was being told?
- Keep it simple, stupid.
- Balancing needs of the learner with the needs of Stakeholders
- Affordances & Constraints of both "Zoom" and "Canvas" as learning platforms with nontraditional learners.
