When creating a class in education it’s about having the end in mind. Where do your learners need to finish? How will they know when they get there? There’s been a lot of research done to maximise the student learning. In Fink’s A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning (2003) we can simplify the course by focusing on creating a significant learning environment. In the course the student should be challenged to their potential.

 

Great teaching and learning starts with a great workflow. Fink argues that most of us have had little training in how to design courses. He highlights that today’s learning environment needs to include such ideas as active learning, significant learning, and educative assessment (Fink 2003)

 

Fink walks us through the design phase that teachers can use as a rubric for our own course creation. There needs to be a focus on all three phases of the design process. The building of strong primary components, assembling into a coherent whole, and a review of the grading strategies (Fink 2003 p.1). There will be activities in the course, but take a holistic view and see that we need other strong components and to make sure they’re integrated.

 

This guide by Fink will lead me to creating a course to educate teachers how to make their own extended online learning with videos.Our school district have given each teacher the necessary tools to complete this job. If our teachers want to create courses in which students have significant learning experiences, then Fink (p.5) says they need to design that quality into their courses. That’s what I hope to achieve. I want to teach a course about video creation so impactful, my learners will immediately jump at the chance to learn, grow, and apply that knowledge.

 

When you read my worksheets and three column table, you should see a trend that describes how deeply I care about creating a significant learning environment. I have followed Fink’s suggestion of the six major types of significant learning. His taxonomy identifies the significant kinds of learning he would like to see included in my course. He emphasises that each kind of learning can stimulate other kinds of learning. Please read my attached Google Document of my teacher video creation course, my three column table of learning goals, activities and assessment. Then please read my two worksheets about how I want to create my significant learning environment.

 

It’s important for my learners to remember how little information our students remember from instruction. When we create the significant learning environment we want then that’s when we’ll truly align our outcomes, assessments, and activities.

 

References:

Fink, L.D. (2003) A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.