Week 1: ID&E Introduction
Weblecture:
Part 1: Theories
Important in this course: Making choices about educational design, but what might be the
mechanism? Why did you choose this method? Goal master: Making a rational substantiation for the
choice
Course: How to design instruction and evaluation!
Figure: If you’re more active as a learner – you retention will be higher. Side note: The percentages
are not making sense at all! There isn’t any scientific literature which is supporting this figure.
! Be always critical about scientific articles
! Learning pyraMYTH
Part 1: Where is the theory?
How can we apply theory to educational practice?– article Margaryan et al. (2015)
University are trying to organize and setting up MOOCs
Bertolini et al: MOOC’s
,Five principles of Merrill: Theory about ID + five other principles – do they MOOCs meet the design
principles?
Conclusion of the article:
- MOOC are well organized
- Instructional design quality is low!
- Findings seem to be comparable for both types of MOOC’s
- Difficult to transfer theory to educational practice
Notes about the article:
- Do MOOCs have to incorporate all principles? In order to be a good MOOC, you have to
apply to all the principles, but is this really relevant?
- Rational for including principles 6-10? Principles about problem-based learning – can you
apply them to MOOC’s?
- Applied coding scheme? Selective? Dependency?
- Inter-rater reliability?
- Explanation why findings seem to be comparable?
Hew et al. (2019) - Theories (see also Brynes, 1992) – how is theory used when we write scientific
articles?
- Describe, explain and/or predict phenomena
- Offer guidelines: prescriptive and descriptive (how this process occurs)
- Can be refined and generalized to the discipline
- Can be verified/falsified
Conclusion: We don’t use a lot of theories in scientific articles (explicitly) – need for a better use of
theory. Only for correlation research, there is more use of scientific articles
,Discussion:
- Distinction explicit, vague and non?
- Interrater reliability? (overall Kappa)
- Use of % in Table 2
- ‘Educational technology does not appear to be a mature discipline?’
Goal of the course: There are theories about learning, instructional design and assessment and
evaluation + constructive alignment + comparison between theories
Part 2: Theories of learning
If you want to compare learning theories, you can have critic about all theories! You will also see
alignments between the learning theories
- Behaviourism: no insights in the mental processes
- Cognitivism: how do people store information in their head – step by step –
cognition/emotion? – what about whole-tasks?
- Constructivism: whole-task + context taken into account
Connectivism: Learning should arise in the environment – everyone is a node, every node should
connect. You have to combine all this knowledge
- More knowledge available – rapid growth of knowledge
- Knowledge is a shared object, a tool
- Learners are self-directed information brokers
Critic about connectivism:
- How do concepts develop?
- Are learners self-directed information brokers?
- How, when and why are nodes connected?
- How can interaction explain ‘learning’?
So, if every theory has it merits, if we really want to take good comparison: we need MTBS –
Byrnes: Meta-theoretical belief systems (MTBSs): Develop a comparison method to compare
theories
, - Four questions about the beliefs of authors who were in favour of applying a certain kind of
theory:
1. Phenomenon of investigation (do I look at behaviour or cognitive processes)
2. Nature of knowledge:
a. What should be learned? (concepts, procedures, skills)
b. How do mental representations causally affect behaviour? (no, mediate,
yes)
3. Origin of knowledge: learning mechanism (innate or environment)
Importance: Guiding theory development, gaining insight into historical linkages between theories,
determine whether (parts) of theories can be coherently combined
Discussion:
- Shifts in which characteristics / questions are used to define the MTBSs and the groups
o Implicitly applied two sets of criteria
- Groups could have also be defined in another way (e.g. cognitivism and behaviourism?) – why
those three groups?
- Do you advocate theoretical imperialism?
o Theoretical imperialism: one main theory which can educationalist use in instructional
design
Cognition: The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought,
experiences and senses. It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as
attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgement and evaluation,
reasoning, problem solving, decision making – cognitive processes use existing knowledge and
generate new one
Part 3: Theories of Instructional Design
Learning theories are descriptive: How might learning take place? What factors involve learning? – no
concrete guidelines!
Weblecture:
Part 1: Theories
Important in this course: Making choices about educational design, but what might be the
mechanism? Why did you choose this method? Goal master: Making a rational substantiation for the
choice
Course: How to design instruction and evaluation!
Figure: If you’re more active as a learner – you retention will be higher. Side note: The percentages
are not making sense at all! There isn’t any scientific literature which is supporting this figure.
! Be always critical about scientific articles
! Learning pyraMYTH
Part 1: Where is the theory?
How can we apply theory to educational practice?– article Margaryan et al. (2015)
University are trying to organize and setting up MOOCs
Bertolini et al: MOOC’s
,Five principles of Merrill: Theory about ID + five other principles – do they MOOCs meet the design
principles?
Conclusion of the article:
- MOOC are well organized
- Instructional design quality is low!
- Findings seem to be comparable for both types of MOOC’s
- Difficult to transfer theory to educational practice
Notes about the article:
- Do MOOCs have to incorporate all principles? In order to be a good MOOC, you have to
apply to all the principles, but is this really relevant?
- Rational for including principles 6-10? Principles about problem-based learning – can you
apply them to MOOC’s?
- Applied coding scheme? Selective? Dependency?
- Inter-rater reliability?
- Explanation why findings seem to be comparable?
Hew et al. (2019) - Theories (see also Brynes, 1992) – how is theory used when we write scientific
articles?
- Describe, explain and/or predict phenomena
- Offer guidelines: prescriptive and descriptive (how this process occurs)
- Can be refined and generalized to the discipline
- Can be verified/falsified
Conclusion: We don’t use a lot of theories in scientific articles (explicitly) – need for a better use of
theory. Only for correlation research, there is more use of scientific articles
,Discussion:
- Distinction explicit, vague and non?
- Interrater reliability? (overall Kappa)
- Use of % in Table 2
- ‘Educational technology does not appear to be a mature discipline?’
Goal of the course: There are theories about learning, instructional design and assessment and
evaluation + constructive alignment + comparison between theories
Part 2: Theories of learning
If you want to compare learning theories, you can have critic about all theories! You will also see
alignments between the learning theories
- Behaviourism: no insights in the mental processes
- Cognitivism: how do people store information in their head – step by step –
cognition/emotion? – what about whole-tasks?
- Constructivism: whole-task + context taken into account
Connectivism: Learning should arise in the environment – everyone is a node, every node should
connect. You have to combine all this knowledge
- More knowledge available – rapid growth of knowledge
- Knowledge is a shared object, a tool
- Learners are self-directed information brokers
Critic about connectivism:
- How do concepts develop?
- Are learners self-directed information brokers?
- How, when and why are nodes connected?
- How can interaction explain ‘learning’?
So, if every theory has it merits, if we really want to take good comparison: we need MTBS –
Byrnes: Meta-theoretical belief systems (MTBSs): Develop a comparison method to compare
theories
, - Four questions about the beliefs of authors who were in favour of applying a certain kind of
theory:
1. Phenomenon of investigation (do I look at behaviour or cognitive processes)
2. Nature of knowledge:
a. What should be learned? (concepts, procedures, skills)
b. How do mental representations causally affect behaviour? (no, mediate,
yes)
3. Origin of knowledge: learning mechanism (innate or environment)
Importance: Guiding theory development, gaining insight into historical linkages between theories,
determine whether (parts) of theories can be coherently combined
Discussion:
- Shifts in which characteristics / questions are used to define the MTBSs and the groups
o Implicitly applied two sets of criteria
- Groups could have also be defined in another way (e.g. cognitivism and behaviourism?) – why
those three groups?
- Do you advocate theoretical imperialism?
o Theoretical imperialism: one main theory which can educationalist use in instructional
design
Cognition: The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought,
experiences and senses. It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as
attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgement and evaluation,
reasoning, problem solving, decision making – cognitive processes use existing knowledge and
generate new one
Part 3: Theories of Instructional Design
Learning theories are descriptive: How might learning take place? What factors involve learning? – no
concrete guidelines!
