Proposal view
| Proposal Type: | Individual Paper |
|---|---|
| Domain: | Lifelong Learning and Professional Development |
| SIG: | Instructional Design |
| Scheduling category: | Lifelong Learning and Professional Development |
| Type | Keynote Paper |
| Equipment |
Computer and data projector / beamer |
| Paper Details |
|---|
| Paper type | Theoretical |
|---|---|
| Title | Research on Instructional Design for Lifelong Learning |
| Abstract | Due to ever more rapid societal, technological and organisational innovations, the knowledge and skills usually acquired during initial education concomitantly become increasingly obsolete. The potential problems arising from this situation are amplified by the proportional increase of the aging in the larger population as a whole, due to demographic factors and a continuous increase of life expectancy. Thus, lifelong learning is essential for individuals to keep up with their world and, more in particular, for professionals to keep pace with the constantly changing global job market and technology. Recent instructional design models stress the importance of real-life tasks as the driving force for learning, and thus suggest that professional tasks or leisure activities provide a good starting point for lifelong learning. An example is the four-component instructional design model (4C/ID), which describes learning environments as built from (1) authentic tasks, (2) supportive information that helps learners to perform the reasoning and problem-solving aspects of those tasks, (3) procedural information that helps learners to perform the routine aspects of those tasks, and (4) part-task practice for routine aspects that need to be developed to a very high level of automaticity. This presentation will discuss three lines of research that aim to make design models such as 4C/ID more responsive to the specific requirements of lifelong learning. First, self-directed learning skills of lifelong learners should be explicitly supported. Second, flexibilisation of learning activities by time, setting and contents is necessary to give lifelong learners easy and on-demand access to the components that sustain meaningful learning from particular real-life tasks. And third, instructional methods should take the enormous heterogeneity of lifelong learners into account. |
| Summary | Due to ever more rapid societal, technological and organisational innovations, the knowledge and skills usually acquired during initial education concomitantly become increasingly obsolete. The potential problems arising from this situation are amplified by the proportional increase of the aging in the larger population as a whole, due to demographic factors and a continuous increase of life expectancy. Thus, lifelong learning is essential for individuals to keep up with their world and, more in particular, for professionals to keep pace with the constantly changing global job market and technology. This is particularly true for fast-developing domains such as the life sciences, information and communication technology, and the financial sector. Recent instructional design models stress the importance of real-life tasks as the driving force for learning, and thus suggest that professional tasks or leisure activities provide a good starting point for lifelong learning. An example is the four-component instructional design model (4C/ID; van Merrienboer & Kirschner, 2007), which describes learning environments as built from (1) authentic tasks, (2) supportive information that helps learners to perform the reasoning and problem-solving aspects of those tasks, (3) procedural information that helps learners to perform the routine aspects of those tasks, and (4) part-task practice for routine aspects that need to be developed to a very high level of automaticity. This presentation will discuss three lines of research that aim to make design models such as 4C/ID more responsive to the specific requirements of lifelong learning. First, self-directed learning skills of lifelong learners should be explicitly supported, for example, by providing them with development portfolios that help to assess own task performance, plan future learning activities (i.e., p/reflection), and monitor progress over time. Studies on the use of development portfolios in the domains of nursing and care will be discussed. The general finding is that the use of development portfolios may contribute to the development of self-directed learning skills and lifelong learning, but only under particular conditions. For instance, learners should be explicitly supported in the identification of relevant performance criteria to be used for self-assessment; regular supervision meetings should be based on the contents of the portfolio, and supervision meetings should not only be used to discuss past performance (reflection) but also pay attention to the planning of future learning tasks in such a way that identified learning needs are satisfied (planning or preflection). Second, flexibilisation of learning activities by time, setting and contents is necessary to give lifelong learners easy and on-demand access to the components (supportive information, procedural information, part-task practice) that sustain meaningful learning from particular real-life tasks. This requires the transformation of educational systems from product-oriented to service-oriented organisations, which are driven by individual learner’s needs rather than their existing supply. Studies will be described that used principles from the field of operations management to design highly flexible educational programmes. The curriculum and operational data from existing institutes in higher professional education were also used to develop discrete-event simulation models in order to demonstrate the effects of operational changes on flexibility. Third, instructional methods should take the enormous heterogeneity of lifelong learners into account, and be adapted to their prior knowledge and skills, age, and other personal characteristics. For instance, a study on note taking during prior knowledge activation (i.e., ‘mobilisation’) in the medical domain showed that note taking increases learning efficiency (i.e., higher performance combined with lower effort) for learners with relatively high prior knowledge, but has the opposite effect for learners with low prior knowledge. Several other examples of “expertise reversal effects” and “age reversal effects” in complex learning domains will be presented: for low-expertise learners, worked-out examples are typically more effective than conventional problem solving but the opposite is true for high-expertise learners, and for older learners, multimodal representation formats are typically more effective than unimodal representations but this needs not to be true for younger learners. Reference Van Merrienboer, J. J. G., & Kirschner, P. A. (2007). Ten steps to complex learning: A systematic approach to four-component instructional design. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum /Taylor and Francis. |
| Keywords | Instructional Design Lifelong Learning Self regulation |
| Appendices | |
| Authors | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Surname | Institution | Country | EARLI Number | Presenting | |
| Jeroen | van Merrienboer | Maastricht University | Netherlands | jeroen.vanmerrienboer@ou.nl | * | |
