Sustainable Learning: Designing a 21st Century Learning Environment

Assistant Dean of the Stanford University School of Education, Paul Kim, launched his course titled “Designing a New Learning Environment” on NovoEd (then called Venture Lab). The course was geared towards empowering education enthusiasts of all backgrounds to cultivate the understanding necessary to create a cutting-edge 21st century learning environment that is both innovative and yet sustainable.

In his introductory video, Professor Kim refers to the instructional design paradigm known as ADDIE, an acronym that stands for: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. He states that while this paradigm is widely accepted, it does not account for the importance of designing for sustainability. Professor Kim intends to lead his students to factor in the importance of sustainability in the design of a learning environment that will be used for the purpose of educating communities in impoverished and under-developed areas of the world.

Professor Kim’s lectures are designed to briefly explain a key concept that empowers students to collectively discuss its importance within the context of designing innovative and sustainable approaches to education.  Enrolled students receive 3 mid-week messages from educators around the world and have the opportunity to listen to at least one guest speaker each week. We believe that that the value these experts bring to students is the ability to have multiple perspectives on certain topics. It is these kind of unique opportunities offered by this course that make the DNLE experience unlike any other in the field of education.

Teaching Assistants Pamela Levine, Shawn Kim, Shwetika Baijal, and Leigh Anne Miller-Gilbert, dedicated tireless hours of their time to support the student community enrolled in this course and the NovoEd (Venture Labs) team congratulates them for their hard work.

Teams in this course collaborated over the last few weeks to work on their unique approach to a sustainable 21st century learning environment for specific target populations. Some of these teams agreed to share pictures of their virtual and local group collaboration sessions. See the images below:

I have also contacted a couple of teams that have been working on some very promising ideas. Stay tuned for a future posts on the work of specific teams in the DNLE course.

Students have been very active in the forums of Professor Kim’s class and many have taken the time to share their thoughts about the course:

• I’ve been involved in formal learning in different environments for many years, but I’ve never had an addiction to learning, as I do today. Venture-lab and this course is the first “class-room” that I’ve been in, that I never want to leave! The lectures are thought- provoking, the activities are rewarding and the forum is stimulating; quite a good experience thus far!

• We have immensely benefited from this course, especially interacting with such a large group. Though I knew that there are people for whom, education is a privilege, I didn’t realise that there are this many challenges. Thanks for the opportunity.

• I think that all those who enrolled in this course are thankful as well and if we do our best to complete the course, those who had the amazing idea of this course, also do their best for us. Foe every assignment, we had the necessary model and instructions to follow. I have also discovered very well prepared teachers from all over the world that shared with us precious information regarding the importance of online education. Once again, I am very grateful! All of us are!

Once the course comes to an end on the Venture Lab platform, Professor Kim plans to continue to maintain an open dialog with teams from the course so that they are able to follow through with the implementation of the learning environments they have designed. The Venture Lab team is very grateful for the hard work Professor Kim and his students around the world have contributed to make this course a complete success.

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