Learning and Instructional Design
It's not often you come across a podcast that so elegantly describes what you're building toward: "pedagogy first, technology second."
For us, this captures the core question in educational technology: How does technology extend what instructors already do well? How do you treat human expertise as the foundation, use technology to augment that expertise and create new capabilities, without letting tools get in the way or diminish the teaching experience?
The key is recognizing what people are already excellent at and what technology allows them to do better at larger scale.
For anyone following EdTech and AI, this podcast with Emma Zone, EdD and Julie Schell is worth your time!
Julie talks about the importance of developing strategies that allow students to apply concepts rather than prove their ability to recall information. To do that, you have to design around where students are actually coming from. You also have to clearly articulate to students what they need to know after the lesson, what they should be able to do, what frameworks they should develop, and what perspectives they should adopt. Then you have to connect all of that to actual learning outcomes - the things you really want to teach to.
The process breaks down into five connected steps:
- Know where your students are coming from.
- Teach them who they actually are.
- Teach to where they need to get to.
- Design the course backwards from those outcomes.
- Develop assessments that show the ability to apply vs. recall.
Most instructors already know how to do this, and they find joy in this work, when they have the time and resources. Some departments support their teams well. Most can't. We see this gap constantly across institutions. Instructors know their courses could be better, but they don't have the time (or energy) to address all these points in practice.
What instructors need are tools that help them articulate what they want in their courses, what they want for their students, and how to get them there - tools where technology enhances what needs enhancing and stays out of the way of everything else. Pedagogy should always be first. We're building the tools that automate the mechanical overhead of course design - the alignment matrices, the documentation, and the assessment scaffolding - so instructors can spend their time (and energy) focusing on teaching toward the learning outcomes they want for their students.
Here's the full article!