[ COURSE OVERVIEW ]
Learning Media Design [05-291/691] is a semester-long course offered in the Fall for the IDeATE Learning Media concentration and HCII minor. It is the third required course in the IDeATe Learning Media sequence .
This studio course focuses on the design aspects of creating effective learning experiences using digital media and emerging technologies. The class will collectively engage in a design inquiry process and learn methods to productively define, conceptualize, prototype and assess learning media products, services and systems. Through readings and discussions we will reflect on the particular considerations of user experience design when engagement and learning are explicit goals. To ground this design inquiry process, we will explore in an emerging application space with actual stakeholders and end users to tackle a real-world challenge in education. Anchoring our learning media design coursework is a design challenge. Students will work in small, interdisciplinary teams to review primary and secondary research, conduct user studies, collect system requirements and and generate concepts and test prototypes that include sequences of technology supported activities and interactions that promote learning while addressing stakeholder constraints. Project Brief: This semester, our key stakeholder client is MakerEd who has launched an Open Portfolios initiative to bring portfolio practices into wider adoption. We will focus our design inquiry and prototyping process on envisioning solutions for a digital portfolio platform, and work with formal and informal educators and their students as our community of users. MakerEd, Remake Learning and CMU's IDeATe program are hosting an Open Portfolio Workshop for 60+ educators and school leaders at CMU on 15-16 November. We'll use this opportunity to showcase and test mid-semester design concepts with these interested users. Digital portfolios are becoming an increasingly important educational approach in 21st Century Learning initiatives. Digital portfolio creation is both a learning process and product that documents student interests, skills, and achievements and enables youth to curate creative outputs and personal accomplishments over time and across learning settings. Digital portfolios can also be used by teachers to monitor and assess progress, and by academic institutions and potential employers in the application review process. As a class we will explore this rich design space for learning. The final project will be a conceptual demonstration of an interactive digital portfolio system. The range of possible working prototypes is very broad, from a wizard-of-oz enactment to a fully functioning interactive system. The intended form of the working prototype and level of functionality will be formulated and approved mid-semester in teams. In the final class sessions, teams will present project concepts to MakerEd Open Portfolio project representatives, and an interested review panel. Project details and the design brief can be found under the Design Challenge. |
Learning Objectives In this course you will learn to:
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