Page 96 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

5.4 Learner-Centered Design 85
away time or to procrastinate, when they are confronted with a task that they are
not familiar or unprepared for. The educational software should be designed to
support the learner’s wavering motivation.
3. Diversity is the Norm. Learners who use the specific tool are often from a
diverse set of backgrounds, with various interests, skills, abilities, learning
styles, etc. “One size fits all” will not satisfy the various needs of diverse
learners.
4. Growth is the Challenge. Learners can be very different from day 1 to day 100.
They may have learned quite a bit about a problem domain and might have
developed a set of skills and practices in that domain; however, most of the
software doesn’t change and grow. The individual has changed, but the
knowledge and the specific practices of a task in the software haven’t.

Therefore, learner-centered design must follow these basic tenets:

• Take learner’s understanding as the result (through coaching, modeling, and
critiquing).
• Create and maintain learner’s motivation (through low cognitive load and
immediate success feedback).
• Offer a wide range of learning techniques (by using different media and
different ways of expression).
• Encourage the learner’s growth (through an adaptable product). In other
words, good scaffolding should be designed for students, and the scaffolding is
available when the student needs it, but not when they want to study inde-
pendently. Motivation can also be sustained by putting learners in the context of
doing, developing software that enables them to construct artifacts and com-
municate with others about those artifacts.

Another theory should be mentioned for designing learning experience, the
universal design for learning (UDL), which is a framework to improve and optimize
teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans
learn. Recognizing that the way individuals learn can be unique, the UDL frame-
work drew upon from neuroscience and education research, was first defined by
David H. Rose in the 1990s (Rose and Meyer, 2002). UDL is a framework for
developing lesson plans and assessments based on the following three main prin-
ciples (Meyer, Rose, and Gordon, 2014):

• Provide multiple means of engagement (the “why” of learning): UDL
encourages teachers to look for multiple ways to motivate students. Letting kids
make choices and giving them assignments that feel relevant to their lives are
some examples of how teachers can sustain students’ interest. Other common
strategies include making skill building feel like a game and creating opportu-
nities for students to get up and move around the classroom.
• Provide multiple means of representation (the “what” of learning): UDL
recommends offering information in more than one format. For example,