Among these three key factors, the number of users depends on the company's ability to acquire users. Per capita usage time mainly depends on product design and learning experience. The average frequency of learning depends on the teaching design.
The general process of online education is as follows:
Every link in this chain has an impact on learning. As a form of distance education, online education is in a state of separation of time and space between learners and teachers, and there is no closely connected learning community like classes, so the quality of teaching design is particularly important. Therefore, instructional design is the core value-added link of online education.
For modern knowledge-intensive companies, the core competitiveness of each company depends on how much knowledge it has that other companies don't have. This knowledge is manifested in talents/technology/patents/methods/processes and so on. In today's high-tech environment, TPCK teacher development framework can also be used to analyze the knowledge and competitiveness of education companies.
From the above picture, we can roughly see the location of the core knowledge of online education companies. Online education companies are not as good as traditional Internet companies in IT technology, and are not as good as educational institutions and training companies in training and teaching. The most unique and competitive knowledge it can possess is the educational technology knowledge produced by the combination of teaching methods and technology, which is used to create high-quality learning experience in high-tech environment. Core knowledge is not only the source of core competitiveness, but also the precipitation of core competitiveness. Without core knowledge, companies that misjudge core knowledge are in danger every minute.
Instructional design is the core knowledge of educational technology. Therefore, the understanding and application of instructional design determines the core competitiveness of online education companies.
When I first came into contact with instructional design, I was confused because the word has many meanings. The result of teaching design mentioned by primary and secondary school teachers is a teaching implementation plan of their own. In courseware design, the result of teaching design is the interactive process of the list of teaching resources and design. In the design of distance teaching materials, the result of instructional design is the learning activities independently completed by learners. When making teaching video, the result of teaching design is a shot draft. Later, I gradually realized that the goal of instructional design is to design a teaching system to help learners achieve their teaching goals. Design is to arrange and combine some elements to form a specific function. In different learning situations, the elements of instructional design are very different, so the target output of instructional design and the process of instructional design are also very different. After further research, I have summarized the following figures:
I think the basic principles of instructional design are relatively stable. In particular, the three learning theories and system theory determine that the basic structure of teaching system is the functional structure of goal-content-method-evaluation. According to the scale and characteristics of the system to be designed, different design processes and methods can be flexibly adopted.
It is worth noting the relationship between learning situation and teaching design. According to the viewpoint of system theory, a system includes both smaller subsystems and larger systems. Only in the environment of large-scale system can the system play a stable role and realize its functions. As far as the teaching system is concerned, different learning situations contain different environmental elements, which makes it impossible for the system in different situations to migrate to another system to play a specific role.
For example, school education has national unified curriculum standards, textbooks, campus teaching schedules, stable class learning communities, classrooms and blackboards. In this "environment", the main design factor for teachers to achieve their learning goals is classroom activities. Gagne's nine teaching events and learning conditions become the main basis of his teaching design, and his teaching design output form is a classroom teaching plan that conforms to the learning principle. However, in the development of distance learning materials, learners cannot communicate with teachers at high frequency, and there is no stable learning community among learners. In this "environment", the teaching system is represented as an autonomous learning resource package, and the design elements are learners' learning activities. Instructional design needs to pay attention to the difficulty order of autonomous learning activities and the level of support provided for learning activities. From this perspective, we can also understand why it is difficult to achieve good learning results in classroom mobile video classes. Classes and lectures can also play a role if they are integrated into the school education environment. However, if the classroom teaching is recorded and put online, it can only be used as a reference for learning resources because of the huge differences in learning environment, and it is difficult to ensure the occurrence of learning.
In this way, the problem comes:
Characteristics of online learning environment:
In addition to these characteristics, another most important constraint is the high input and low marginal characteristics of the information economy. This requires that the teaching of design can be reused in a very large range. In fact, the consideration of reuse requires the instructional design unit to be more "complete", that is, it can play its role without a specific learning environment. Considering from these aspects, I think the teaching design method centered on learning activities and the corresponding learning environment design are the best choice.
Compared with the classroom-centered instructional design, the instructional design centered on learning activities is easier to migrate. In teaching-centered learning design, the output of teaching design is teaching plan, which can only be transformed into learners' learning experience through the concrete implementation of teachers. This instructional design is influenced by teachers' abilities and preferences, and is relatively personalized, which restricts reuse. If it is based on learning activities, it will be easier to reuse. Learning activities consisting of step-by-step learning tasks, required learning resources and teaching scaffolding can be directly used and produced by learners. This teaching design scheme has high investment, but it can be reused many times to reduce the cost.
On the other hand, the abstract level of activity theory is higher. If classroom teaching is regarded as a specific learning activity, then the scope of teaching can be expanded and the original formal and informal learning activities can be included in the same teaching design theory, which can provide a theoretical basis for future lifelong learning and ubiquitous learning. This design theory can also give full play to the advantages of mobile devices and expand learning activities from the classroom to the real world.
Taking learning activities as the basic unit of the teaching system has many advantages. However, there are still many puzzles about how to design learning activities. Listed below.
After reading teacher Yang's teaching design method, I feel that it is still difficult to design activities from the basic principles. I am thinking about whether we can design common different types of learning activities as templates and apply them according to the best practices of each different type of learning activities, so as to improve the efficiency of design. If it is designed according to principles, it is necessary to design an EPSS system to help teachers design activities that conform to principles.
A teaching system is composed of environment and activities, and rich learning activities need the corresponding learning environment to support it. From the perspective of activity theory, learning environment should be composed of resources, tools, rules and community building tools. If we want to support all kinds of learning activities, we should have a mobile-based virtual learning environment as a support. What elements and functions should such a learning environment have? This is also a bigger problem.