Our weekly post about active learning and Bloom’s Taxonomy got me thinking about how important it is for active, personalized learning to be incorporated into instructional design.
Our course introduced me to Bloom’s Taxonomy and it really helped me understand my own educational experience. Of course some classes and educational experiences have felt very rewarding, and some have not. For me, what has determined which classes and educational experiences have or have not felt like valuable, meaningful, or thought-provoking classes relates to which stage shown in Bloom’s Taxonomy is used in the course. What I’m getting at here is that I think Bloom’s Taxonomy and active learning relate to personalized learning, and to cognitive load.
Let me talk about an example of what I mean — I recall taking a series of very uninspiring classes at the start of university. These were large courses that were very “remember” based, right? The instructional design of these courses were about remembering lecture content for an exam and writing the right answer. Maybe an ounce of “understand” based on if the exam was multiple choice versus written. Classes in this format make me feel burned out, confused, and usually disinterested in the topic of the course. I believe that is because there was an extraneous load that these courses put on many of its students. Courses like the one I describe are so impersonal that they enable the wrong type of cognitive load to be put on the learner due to an unengaging and inactive design.
I can also recall classes that are very personalized and use higher stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy. These courses could even be intrinsically more difficult than the courses I discussed before, and yet the mental load they applied to me was less. My belief is that the extraneous load is lessened because now the learning is meaningful. That the learning is actually applicable to something, anything! That it feels meaningful because it’s personalized and applicable and enjoyable! I think from the view of instructional design, we need to keep in mind how to make learning meaningful. And y’kno, like, enjoyable?
References
https://www.valamis.com/hub/blooms-taxonomy