Design-Based Learning

EDER 679.35 Conceptualizing the Learning Sciences

This course is organized around three main questions: What is learning? What is a learner? How can/does an educator intervene in an environment to affect learning? The course will examine common themes and coherences across contemporary theories of learning, review strategies for the study of learning, introduce the notion of “design” as developed within the learning sciences, and critically survey recommendations for educational interventions.

EDER 679.36 Design-Based Learning

Within this course, the word design is understood to refer to any effort to structure knowledge and to organize engagements in ways that enable access to and afford refinement of established human insights. The intention, then, is to explore the range of influence that an educator might have through structuring activities, configuring information, incorporating technologies, and other interventions.

EDER 678.61 Active Learning Environments

The aim of this course is to provide students with an opportunity to apply theory to practice in terms of assessing and designing active learning environments. Students will investigate current educational trends related to learning spaces, spatial design, informal and formal learning, and virtual space. They will examine the application of learning theories to guide the design of contemporary education within technology enhanced learning environments. As part of this work, they will identify infrastructure factors that impact the physical design of the learning space; investigate the nature and type of technology to be accessible; and pedagogical factors that need to be addressed when a creating technology-enabled active learning space.

The practical component of the course will require students to apply theory to practice in developing a blue print proposal for an active learning space that is technology enabled to meet an identified need within their professional setting. As part of the work, students will examine furnishings, technology and infrastructure needs, along with financial costing of the project. In doing so, they will examine the challenge in balancing costs of investment/required ongoing supports with desired learning goals. A key goal of the project is to create a physical space that responds to this student motivated learning thesis.

EDER 679.38 Inquiry and Society

Taking a systems perspective on society and culture, this course invites students to engage in a critical analysis of current as well as historical strategies for communication, learning, socialization, and work. It explores the ways in which we use technologies and the impact they have on our daily routines, social interactions, political systems, economic structures and beliefs and invokes design principles to frame possible educational responses.

EDER 603.06 Design-Based Research Methods in Education

This course focuses on how educational researchers design, support and study learning innovations in real-world learning contexts. Design-based research is a collection of methodological principles and approaches to studying innovative learning interventions. Design-based research is described as a methodology designed by and for educators to increase the impact, transfer, and translation of education research into improved practices. DBR involves the building of research informed solutions to complex learning problems, the systematic generation and testing of theory in naturalistic settings with the goal of impacting both educational theory and educational practice. In contrast to experiments that aim to describe how learning occurs under given conditions of instruction, design-based research focuses on the iterative design, implementation and evaluation of new instructional interventions in complex, naturalistic learning environments. Data and analysis techniques are used in both formative and summative ways to inform the next steps in instruction, design and research, and to inform

EDER 602 Program and Practice Evaluation

The purpose of this course is to provide an understanding of evaluation - as a discipline, as a profession, as a process and a product in a wide range of educational and social contexts. The primary focus of the course is program evaluation rather than the assessment of individuals (for example, the measurement of student achievement or personnel review). The course focuses on developing an understanding of the logic of evaluative thinking, the nature of evaluation as a profession and discipline, the knowledge and skills needed to be expert consumers of program evaluation and novice evaluators in contexts relevant to individual career contexts. Topics include: the logic of evaluation; central concepts in evaluation; approaches to evaluation; standards in evaluation; and the social and political nature of evaluation theory. 

EDER 679.42 Advanced Study of the Learning Sciences

This course will continue with the themes of the previous course, Conceptualizing the Learning Sciences, with a broader goal of nurturing a connoisseurship of learning theories. It aims to support understandings of the diversity and range of learning theories, to offer strategies for deconstructing learning theories, to explore how various perspectives are consciously or unconsciously enacted, and to extend principles of design for research and learning.

EDER 679.43 Design-Based Assessment

Extending the topics addressed in Design-Based Learning, this course focuses in particular on formulating and formatting assessments in ways that simultaneously afford educators insights into learners’ interpretations and provide learners with cues to extend their own learning. Topics will include examining the range of information sources that might be used in assessments, dynamic revisioning of evaluation tasks, and deliberately structuring feedback loops into a learning environment.

EDER 600 Research Methodology in Education

This first course in educational research methodologies provides the background necessary to make cogent decisions around the types of research questions that might be asked and the kinds of insights and answers particular methods can provide.

This introductory course is intended for graduate students in the first year of their cohort-based Master’s of Education programs. The course focuses on some of the issues and dilemmas that frame the context for contemporary research, and guides participants in a preliminary consideration of research strategies, questions and methods, for further study and application in the subsequent course EDER 692 Collaboratory of Practice. In relation to EDER 692 Collaboratory of Practice, this first course includes a discussion of action research in education as a pragmatic way to integrate various methods in one school based research project. Participants will also be encouraged to approach research articles and reports with a critical perspective and develop some skills and techniques for this kind of close reading.

EDER 679.52 Design-Based Leadership

This course aims to apply and extend principles of design for educational leaders in both school and higher education systems. It adopts a systems perspective on learning settings – that is, it regards “learning settings” not merely as settings for learning, but as settings that learn. The course will thus look in particular at how “leadership” might be construed within a frame of connect-and-collaborate rather than command-and-control.

EDER 604 Collaboratory of Practice

Collaboratories of Practice represent a fusion of two important developments in contemporary research: communities of practice and collaboratories. A collaboratory is a new networked organizational form involving structured experiences of authentic, real-world practice which serve as sources of active inquiry and professional learning. This course provides opportunities for individuals or groups to investigate real world problems and to devise or recommend pragmatic solutions suitable to their contexts. This course facilitates the application of knowledge in real world settings and to investigate and learn from inquiry in the field.

EDER 606 Writing Educational Research

This course will focus on examining and developing the skills associated with crafting an academic paper. Topics will include genres and purposes of academic writing, and venues for presentation and publication. An academic paper is more than a compilation of a literature review, some relevant information, and a conclusion. An acceptable paper- whether intended for an academic or a professional audience, and whether a research report or a theoretical-philosophical argument – takes a clearly defined topic or idea, situates it in the current literature, and supports it with a well-structured discussion. The principal intensions of this course are to introduce students to the various structures of academic papers and to provide support in their efforts to craft and publish their written work.