Prospectus

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Living Education Lab – the Basics

Course
2024-2025

Admission requirements

Third year enrolled students from LU, TU Delft and EUR.
Proficiency in English reading, speaking and writing.
Full-time commitment

Description

In this first part of the joint Minor Living Education Lab, the basics, the domains of Instructional Design, Technology-enhanced Learning/Teaching and Design Thinking with interdisciplinary group work are introduced.

Instructional design
Traditional design models often break up a complex whole into smaller isolated parts and teach the parts separately (atomistic design approach). This often results in separation of knowledge, skills and attitudes, fragmentation, and low transfer of learning. In this basic part of the minor, you learn to design education in a holistic way. Holistic design approaches attempt to deal with complex learning without losing sight of the whole. You learn to design education in which complex knowledge, skills and attitudes are learnt in an integrated way, i.e. in the authentic context of whole, real life, tasks, with adaptive support to deal adequately with individual differences.

Technology Enhanced Learning
Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) offers different affordances for supporting primary and secondary learning support. On the one hand, technology has classically been used to optimize information distribution and assessment processes. On the other hand technologies can also enhance the effectiveness, efficiency and enjoyability of learning. You learn how to design TEL solutions and interventions targeting primary and seconday learning outcomes. Furthermore, different educational technology approachessuch as mobile learning, learning analytics, augmented and virtual reality, AI for education, and empirical data about their effects will be introduced.

Design Thinking
The minor is based on the principles of design thinking. Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative, participatory design process that is used to understand users (in this specific context students, teachers, and academics), challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions by prototyping and testing. Involving five phases - Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test - it is most useful to tackle complex design problems that are ill-defined or unknown. Each design thinking phase will last for two weeks. In this part of the minor, students working with multidisciplinary groups will understand the principles of Design thinking by exploring and dissecting relevant use cases.

Course objectives

After completing this course, students

  • are able to compare and contrast the atomistic and holistic instructional design approaches and their implementation in education

  • are able to specify whole task instructional design and pedagogies for a given educational challenge

  • know about different educational technologies, their affordances and how they are used for enhancing learning

  • know and understand the phases of design thinking and associated activities and outcomes

Timetable

On the right side of programme front page of the E-guide you will find links to the website and timetables, uSis and Brightspace.

Rotterdam-day: lectures/workgroup covering the design thinking perspective in the morning and work in small group in the afternoon, if necessary supported by teachers/experts/supervisors.

Leiden-day: lectures/workgroup covering the educational/pedagogical perspective in the morning and work in small group in the afternoon, if necessary supported by teachers/experts/supervisors.

Delft-day: lectures/workgroup covering the educational technology perspective in the morning and work in small group in the afternoon, if necessary supported by teachers/experts/supervisors.

Remaining two days of each week: work with small group on project (remote or in person).

Mode of instruction

Lectures will be combined with group work and consulting sessions with experts from educational science, didactics, technology-enhanced learning, and agile management and design thinking.

Assessment method, weighing, resit

Programmatic Assessment
Based on Van Der Vleuten et al (2015) students will be assessed by programmatic assessment. This means that students would engage in many low-stakes formative assessment moments (e.g., assignments between lectures, reflection blogs, coaching dialogues) building up to a summative decision at the end of the course (individual report and group presentation).
Regarding the weekly lectures, students will write a reflection blog. These weekly reflections will form a final individual reflection report on the learning journey which will be graded. The group presentation will also be graded (same grade for whole group).
The groups give a final presentation about their analysis, process, developed solutions and evaluation studies performed. The assessment by both teachers and (external) experts from the field will be based on the criteria:

  • Relevance: The extent to which the team shows a good understanding of the challenge taken into consideration, its context and identified the target audience related to their challenge

  • Quality: The extent to which the solution developed addresses the challenge effectively by considering the context where it will be implemented, and the target group needs. This includes quality or analysis, selected methodology of development, developed interventions as also quality of evaluation.

  • Creativity: The extent to which the solution is an original and novel idea, having some elements of innovativeness compared to what is already available in the education sector and the market.

  • Performance and teamwork, interdisciplinarity of solution

  • Transparency and robustness (systematic) of the processes undertaken (documentation of steps, meeting minutes, brainstorming outputs, process diagrams etc.), including collaborative process (Roles and responsibilities)

Weighing

Students receive one (individual) end grade for the course (15 EC) which consists of an individual grade for the reflective report (30% of the end grade) and a group grade for the end presentation (70% of the end grade).

Resit

The date will be published here as soon as possible.

Reading list

During the minor, advice is given on literature that is relevant to a specific lecture. Moreover, students themselves look for literature (with or without the help of the lecturers) that is relevant to them and to the case they are working on.

Registration

TBA

Contact

For questions regarding the minor you can contact Inge Bork.

Remarks

The minor will be cancelled if less than 15 students apply.