Class Reflections

Reflections on “Learning Theories and Instruction”

By Margery Clemens

While studying the various learning theories, I was surprised to learn how adequately the Adult Learning theories correlate with my current learning style. Relevant and active learning are perhaps the most important elements for me. I become much more engaged when the subject matter relates to what I am interested in and learn best when I can transfer that information to a project or activity that is related to the real world. Learning to write blogs and set up RSS feeds was very interesting, because I was able to use this information to create a blog for my website. I became easily distracted when the subject matter did not directly relate to what I am interested in or if it did not offer an opportunity to work on a hands-on project. I am very much like this at work also. If I am facilitating a crisis management call or creating a root cause trend analysis I am focused, alert and able to work for hours on end. But meetings, conference calls and general system monitoring bores me to tears and my attention wavers after only a few minutes. Most of my co-workers are the same and we spend a lot of time multi tasking to prevent boredom.

The information I learned in this course will help me understand the needs of the learners who will be using my course designs to learn a new skill. My future work will be with adult learners and I believe that I have a deeper understanding of what motivates and drives them. As an adult learner myself, I can see that relevance and the ability to create or use a hands on process is very important.

Overall, this class was insightful and I will refer back to the many theories often as I design courses in the future. However, there were some drawbacks. With the exception of the blog and RSS feeds, there was not a lot of hands on work. Most weeks were filled with a large amount of reading and one discussion. I found it difficult to stay motivated and often procrastinated, which then frustrated me because I prefer to get my schoolwork out of the way before the week-end. I would have preferred working with assignments that were more relevant to my future role as an instructional designer. Perhaps designing or describing a scenario in which each of the theories could be used as an instructional designer would have helped show the relevance. I also would have enjoyed reading specific examples of how real life designers used these theories in their work.

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