Michele Meinke Kroll
Learning Technologies & Design Ph.D. Portfolio
UNH Extension -Behavioral Health and Well-Being Field Specialist
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Research Projects
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We are a team of graduate students led by Dr. Isa Jahnke at the University of Missouri-Columbia at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies. We have the vision that Learning Expeditions (LeX) become a new way of meaningful learning that goes beyond classroom learning and supports learners to explore and connect topics and theoretical concepts with items, augmented information and physical objects in the real world. This project started in 2016 with Graduate students designing an augmented reality location based campus tour for the Mizzou K-12 Online Learning Summer Institute hosting over 130 students mostly from Brazil. The aim of the project was to build a gamified activity that promoted a campus cultural community connection for those students. The second iteration of this project was to put those who developed the first game into the researcher role and conduct a study of non-IT students to observe how they would design, test and build a (LeX) prototype using ARIS or Guidigo platforms from a selected topic of their choice. This project focused on students as pro-sumers.
Team
Dr. Isa Jahnke
Michele Kroll
Shann Bossaller
Michelle Todd
Neeley Current
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External post-doctoral fellow
Dr. Alexander Nolte -
(University of Pittsburgh)
Understanding the Differences of Students as Active Learners and Co-Designers –Results From an Open Course Design of Student Developing Games for Learning For Non-IT Students
Abstract: Our study demonstrates how Non-IT students designed, developed, and tested a location-based digital gamified application for learning. We designed a deep learning opportunity for students from non-technical programs which focused on student collaborative knowledge creation combined with learning expeditions. We applied interview methods, surveys and analyzed group interaction. The results from four student groups show their learning processes and motivations. Findings show that students encounter difficulties of becoming co-designers of learning. Implications raise awareness to distinguish between active learners and co-designers. An active student is not necessarily a co-designer; a co-designer is active but also acts beyond the given course design, s/he constructively pulls other resources in order to accomplish her own set goals. We discuss the course design principles for deep learning and adding student reflection of ‘why didn’t you do it the other way’ as a crucial question during the learning process.
Keywords: higher education, meaningful learning, co-design, learner-centered
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