Reading this week’s amazing article and chapter Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism of Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology, I began reflecting upon my previous best/worst learning experiences and how teaching/learning is approached from a different perspective. In this blog, I would like to share a story about my learning experience and why I enjoyed it. It made sense to me how the authors present a conclusion for choosing the appropriate design technique and taking into various factors.
In the Summer of 2019, I was registered in a course SENG 275 – Software Testing. This was an entirely new course only taught for the second time. One of the 400-year upper-level was broken down to this course and a 300 level course, which requires the instructor to design the course more tailored to an audience lacking some knowledge about some of the topics. I would have to say that my learning experience from this course would be one of the best ones I have had. A lot of factors contributed to that, such as, instructor’s engaging practices to increase learner’s curiosity, solving complex problems which relate to real-world issues, assessment of the knowledge gained in the course, etc. I believe the course was designed by using the Cognitivism design. Most of the learning was done by helping us learn the new topics by relating them to familiar examples, concepts, real-world problems which led me to applying newly learned principles to solve problems and combining my previous learning with the new learning to increase my knowledge.
The course assessed my transfer of knowledge in more than one ways. Actively learning, testing and solving software bugs in the course assessments was a key to make sure that I gain valuable insights from it. I really enjoyed the course due to how the pace of the course changed my interest in the topic from minimum to maximum and helped me to unravel that interest further by applying the theoretical knowledge to a practical application. One other factor would also be the instructor’s opinions and experiences with the subject that he connected with each topic and explained in detail the “what” and “how”. His real life experiences were very helpful to understand and just learn more about how the industry in my field works. This was a bonus on top of the learning I received from the content of the course. This course could be very well designed in a Behaviorism design technique, but I would have not enjoyed the course, nor would I have gained so much learning and knowledge from it. I believe the course was a perfect example of how Cognitivism design is beneficial. I would also like to see how the course could be designed in a more complex way using Constructivism and how that might change my perception of the learning I gained from the course.
