Robert F. Kenny’s research while affiliated with Florida Gulf Coast University and other places

This chapter presents an actionable framework that evolved as part of a partnership focused on creating a planned, innovative community in southwest Florida. Through a series of discussions that took place during a planning charrette hosted by the community developer, the framework suggests a multi-faceted approach to sustainable and resilient community development As part of the planning team, we developed a working vocabulary and framework/compass envisioned to build a community whose mission would be based on principles of sustainability and resilience from which and the community could be supported in a partnership among the developer and its vendors, the local K-12 charter school, and the local regional, comprehensive university.

The authors define Problem Based Learning (PBL) as a student-centered, formative, pedagogical approach in which pupils acquire critical and design thinking skills along with content knowledge. The problem focus is similar to cases found in Case-Based Learning (CBL) that has been commonplace for decades in many academic domains. Most of what is found in the literature about PBL tends to be descriptive in nature, whereas little can be found that assists with identifying the process of identifying root causes for those problems and with sustaining the strategy in the classroom. This chapter presents a case for integrating story and design thinking to develop causal analysis and to add rigor through formative conjecture modeling.

The RETAIN Model is a game design and evaluation model for serious games. In this study, educators evaluated social change web-based and mobile app games using the RETAIN model rubric. In general, web-based games scored higher on the RETAIN rubric than their mobile app counterparts. In addition, the educators analyzed the social change games for their “hidden curriculum.” In some cases, the rubric and “hidden curriculum” contributed to educators altering the way they used the games they had appraised by supplementing context, incorporating discussion, or not using the games at all. The RETAIN model rubric offered educators a tool to evaluate digital games.

Being faced with the recent need to rapidly (and with little notice) move from teaching face-to-face (f2f) to an online environment, instructional designers and instructors have been confronted with the need to learn quickly how to more ambitiously approach combining course subject matter with the most effective means to engage with and immerse students in that content. Traditionally, when designing f2f courses, instructors would supplement/enhance their course materials with social experiences at the moment they conducted their classes. The idea of crafting or curating engagement and immersive classroom practices and activities was often viewed as a separate, add-on instructional process. Until recently, most online courses were restricted by the state university boards definition of an online courses and were viewed as mainly asynchronous events, meaning it was up to the student to create their own individual experiences. While those restrictions have been relaxed, those who were recently faced with having to move from face to face to an online modality simply digitizing the content because they had little time and/or little background in understanding how to integrate lived experiences, simulating the social event that occurred in their f2f delivery. The literature, as well as many instructional design textbooks, are full of examples that identify the need to co-create in an online environment content that is simultaneously embellished with immersive and engaging social experiences. We like many instructional technologists, have been trying to teach our teachers and instructors how to design instruction that is applicable for the online environment. Having participated in and observed others’ struggles to be forced to rapidly move content online over the past year and a half, the authors became motivated to update a series of research studies on social and cognitive engagement in online learning that they had been conducting for more than a decade. An unintended consequence of the analysis of the various attempts we had made to overcome the perceived immediacy and socialization shortcomings in our own courses was that we were able to study the impact that the actual transactions that occurred between us as instructors and our learners. We discovered that what was most often overlooked was the fact that, while our students continually see to push for more distance or online learning, their perception of and preference for distance learning did not reduce their human need to be interconnected. Perhaps it was the forced social distancing required by the pandemic that made this more obvious. But it became very apparent that what is now especially needed to be included in our course designs are the complex constructs that create immediate, inter-personal relationships between individuals, even (and especially) in the virtual classroom to connect learners and teachers on a social, psychological and cognitive plane –to create that missing sense of place that Meyrowitz No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior (Meyrowitz, 1985) once longed for. A major goal of this formative, personal study, then, is to provide some indication as to the significant, deleterious impacts on the dispositions towards learning that can occur when any one or more of these three characteristics is missing.in the development of classroom experiences, regardless of modality. The theoretical basis of this perspective follows the National Education Association (NEA) report “Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society” (National Education Association, 2012), that suggests that all course design needs to focus on what they refer to as the Four C’s: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Research has shown that quality instructor–student interactions far outweigh many other considerations in attaining positive learning outcomes. Although this may be inherently obvious, little has been shown in the literature to indicate that instructor/teacher preparation programs in general dedicate much time on how to train teachers the actual process of applying specific tactics to interact with their students that create a highly engaging culture of interactive, participatory learning in their classrooms. Much can be learned from reviewing the well-developed, best practices utilized by live interactive improv performers, whose goal is to create positive interactions with their audiences (i.e., students). Those creative techniques as found in this chapter provide a glimpse of those techniques and tactics and provide a basis to compare them to similar strategies that can be implemented by instructional designers and teachers to assess their impact of the learning transactions between teachers and their students regardless of the mode of course delivery (i.e., F2F, blended/hybrid or online).

As instructional designers continue to assess their design process, the need only intensifies for having a deeper understanding of how it connects to the relationships evolving among the instructors, students, peers, content, and the technology they use. The lenses of these relationships are alterable, especially as defined by the latter. We adopt the concept of media ecology as a means to systematically assess the impact on these interrelationships. Teaching and learning, after all, boil down to communicating information among these entities. Media ecology has been found to effectively describe these communications channels. The authors advocate the use of media ecology as a means of introducing design thinking into the enterprise of teaching of instructional technology, as it requires students to ask the right questions and causes them to interpret these relationships through a different and unique perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss this viewpoint and examine how to rethink instructional design methods by focusing on and assessing how individuals transact and communicate information during the learning process.

Historically, knowledge has been viewed as an asset in that, once it is “owned” (i.e., acquired) by an individual, it can never be taken away (Rowley, 2000). First and foremost, we need to distinguish between the concepts of information acquisition and knowledge acquisition. The latter is the third in a five-step process of deep learning with data, information, understanding, and wisdom filling out the continuum (Ackoff, 1999). For this reason, we suggest that the term “knowledge acquisition” that appears to be so often in the literature may actually be a misnomer (Compton & Jensen, 1990). What many may be referring to is actually information acquisition. For the purposes of this chapter, however, we may interchange the two terms with this caveat in mind.

The RETAIN Model is a game design and evaluation model for serious games. In this study, educators evaluated social change web-based and mobile app games using the RETAIN model rubric. In general, web-based games scored higher on the RETAIN rubric than their mobile app counterparts. In addition, the educators analyzed the social change games for their “hidden curriculum.” In some cases, the rubric and “hidden curriculum” contributed to educators altering the way they used the games they had appraised by supplementing context, incorporating discussion, or not using the games at all. The RETAIN model rubric offered educators a tool to evaluate digital games.