Design Practice: Learning Experience Map

Exercise Overview

In this practice exercise, you will draft a learning map to help you organize your thoughts about the lesson you are evaluating and redesigning. At this point in the course, we are turning the corner from "evaluation mode" to "redesign mode". We offer a sample map below to get your started, but feel free to sketch out your learning experience map in any format that you prefer. If the map sample we share below feels too rigid or structured, feel free jot down your ideas using your own preferred approach, such as notes on a blank piece of paper, post-it-notes, note cards, an online tool, etc. ... or create a sketch on a whiteboard like the design sketch shared by JR Dingwall below. The format and structure of your learning experience map is NOT what is important. Instead, the main purpose of this exercise is for you take a moment to document (or diagram) your lesson design ideas. Let's get started!

Course Design Sketch was created by Kirsten Linquist and JR Dingwall

Exercise Instructions

As you begin this exercise, please gather the evaluation notes you took about your lesson review, revisit our personas, as well as your reflection in Module 1 with the photo you selected to represent your chosen persona. Think about your learners and their skill and knowledge gaps you identified in our Empathy Map exercise from Module 1, and the authentic real-world problems or tasks you identified that should be the focus of instruction you are designing.

As you refer to your notes from this module where you documented your evaluation decisions, grab a blank piece of paper, a whiteboard, post-it-notes, or any online or offline tool that will allow you to start documenting your redesign ideas. We have adapted a learning experience map (see below) from the Creating a Support System for Contextualized Instruction: A Toolkit for Program Managers Links to an external site. that you may find helpful as place to start (click here to view or download a blank Learning Experience Map on Google Docs) Links to an external site.:

Now, begin to fill in the white space in front of you by answering the following for each of these headings within the context of the lesson you evaluated and you are now redesigning. While the map before you starts with all blank space, over time you will begin to fill in the white space as you add clarity to your ideas.

Learner audience: Jot down a brief description of the intended audience for your instruction. Include the target grade level, which will focus your plan on a specific skill and knowledge level.
Time period of learning experience map: Make a decision about the intended time period of your instruction. Keep in mind ... the longer your instruction, the more time you will need to spend designing the instruction and developing the associated materials! We recommended you start small with a lesson of relatively short duration that would be part of a larger course (for example, a one hour lesson as part of a bigger course). You can always go back and add more lesson segments, which is easier than trying to scale back once you realize you have bitten off more than you can chew.
Instructional alignment: Spend a lot of time thinking about this section. Here your aim is ensuring your instruction will have real-world relevance to your adult learners and focus on skills and knowledge needed as they pursue their life goals. Your design goal is to contextualize your instruction by focusing (i.e. aligning) your lesson to:

the real-world skills and knowledge gaps you have identified that will be the focus of your instruction (refer back to the specific skill and knowledge gaps you identified in our Empathy Map exercise from Module 1 and the Resources: Desired Skills & Knowledge page in Supplementary Resources and Exercises section of this course),
an authentic real-world context familiar to your learners that you will use to frame your lesson (refer back to the authentic real-world problems or tasks you identified earlier in this module that should be the focus of instruction you are designing, as well as the Resources: Desired Skills & Knowledge page in Supplementary Resources and Exercises section of this course), and
applicable academic skills benchmarked within the College and Career Readiness standards that you identified earlier.

Instructional objectives: Make an attempt to define the instructional objectives by writing a statement about what your learners should be able to do at the conclusion of the lesson.
Merrill's First Principles of Instruction: Now, turn your attention to designing the learner's experience (i.e. what your learner will "do" and "experience" within your lesson). Your focus here is describing specific learning activities (as guided by the instructor or instruction) that will help your learners gain the skills and knowledge you have identified as your focus. You will spend a lot of time in Module 3 defining and refining your plan for these activities, but for now try to at least jot down some ideas for each of these instructional phases:

Real-world problem / task focus
Activation
Demonstration
Application
Integration / Assessment

Your Evaluation and reDesign Decisions

Your learning experience map is just a starting point that will evolve as your progress through your redesign process. An example of an instruction map for a potential lesson for Geoff, one of our personas, is presented below (click here to view on Google Docs) Links to an external site.:

Let's review a few of areas of this example learning experience map for Geoff:

Instructional alignment: While Geoff's career interests including managing his family farm, he struggles with reading comprehension, a skill he will need to improve in order to achieve his career goals. This lesson focuses on this skill gap.

The targeted real-world skills for this lesson are based on career skills guidance in MyNextMove.com (drilling down to farm managers) Links to an external site., as well as Career Clusters (Agribusiness Systems Career Pathway) Links to an external site..
The authentic real-world context is that of a business manager comparing the benefits and costs associated with a business decision (in this case the benefits and costs associated with pesticide use), and
In the prior design practice exercise, we identified a need for instruction for Geoff to improve his reading and comprehension skills. Therefore, reading (a College and Career Readiness strand under English Language Arts / Literacy) will be the focus, in particular Anchor Standard 2. Given Geoff's ability to read at a 6th grade level, the applicable Grade Level grouping is Grade D (Low Adult Secondary).

Merrill's First Principles of Instruction: Going forward, the listed learning activities will need to be refined, but these statements provide a brief outline of how the instructor and instruction will guide the learners' experience (i.e. what your learners will "do" and "experience" within your lesson) to help our learners gain the identified skills

Before you move on ...

Take a moment review your learning experience map, and consider the following questions:

To what extent do your instructional activities focus on (i.e. align with) your real-world relevance goals (i.e. real-world skills, real-world context, and academic standard benchmarks)?
What considerations do you need to make to keep your lesson relevant for your intended audience and appropriate for their grade level?
How have you used sources such as MyNextMove.com Links to an external site., Career Clusters (Agribusiness Systems Career Pathway) Links to an external site., and the College and Career Readiness Standards to identify relevant skills to target for your learner audience?
Considering your intended time period for this instruction, will your planned learning activities take too long (or not enough time)? If so, you will need to adjust either your intended time period or planned learning activities.