Week 4: Authentic learning environment

 One thought has been running through my head ever since I started this class: how to provide an authentic learning environment to the potential learners for my instruction? 

Sometimes when I took classes, I studied a huge amount of content, but I didn’t know what I've learned after the classes. Sometimes I didn’t know how to apply what I learned when the situation was given. At the time, I thought that I didn't study hard or didn't understand it properly, so I was not able to solve this problem. But after studying last week and this week, I realized it wasn't my fault. I think this is because the classes I learned mostly evaluated whether the concept was well delivered. They did not offer the opportunity of practicing applying what I had learned to problems I might encounter in my real life. Of course, a good understanding of the basic concepts is important. However, any knowledge is not useful unless applying the concepts learned to real-world problems. In other words, well-made instructions demonstrate how to put the newly learned concept to good use and show examples of using or utilizing the concept in real problem situations. It also provides learning content or assessments to ensure that learners are able to solve the presented problem on their own using the concepts. In short, authentic learning is an important concept when designing instruction. 

My instruction is to teach how to design an educational mobile application according to the given specification. The potential learners will be people without a technical background in the field of education: I should consider each step can be easy to follow. I should also demonstrate how to read the specification of the educational mobile app, convert the item list into the design elements in the design layout (or mock-up), and draw the design layout using pencil-and-paper or design tools. It is important to make it possible for learners to practice looking at various types of design specifications and changing them into design elements. When working in the industry, customers who want to create mobile apps should be both content providers and designers. However, in most cases, they don't know how to apply their ideas to the mobile app environment because they have no knowledge of mobile apps. It is a reality that a considerable amount of time is spent on specification review and revision in the mobile app development stage. Because what content providers think and what developers think are very different. Because I spend a considerable amount of time exchanging opinions and making the final draft, QA (Quality Assurance) or testing time is shortened. Therefore, unexpected bugs may occur. In this regard, if a content provider's overall understanding of mobile app development and further basic layout sketches are made, the development time can be shortened, and potential bugs can be found and fixed in advance by dedicating sufficient time to QA and testing. Therefore, this planned instruction will be a useful course for those who desire to make an educational mobile app. 

Working on the major project this week made me feel overwhelmed: it is not clear how to apply the pebble-in-the-pond to my instruction. I read the article again and felt I understand this concept, but when I try to apply this approach to my instruction, my head becomes blank. I need to get feedback from the instructor after applying the pebble-in-the-pond to my instruction and update it for the final product. Frankly, I didn’t have sufficient time to practice CSS because of the major project. I am so worried about I can finish this planned instruction.