Designing Education Experiences that Motivate, Engage and Endure

Michael Dennin, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Dean, Division of Undergraduate Education, UC Irvine

Michael Dennin, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Dean, Division of Undergraduate Education, UC Irvine

Drawing on experience as a youth coach, Michael emphasizes learning by doing and celebrating successes. He designs educational experiences that help students understand what works, providing clear goals, engagement activities and feedback. His approach combines active learning, iterative improvement and guidance to foster meaningful outcomes in undergraduate education.

Most of my key insights come from experiences as a youth coach. Two central elements of my approach are: (1) people learn by doing and (2) people need more feedback on what they are doing well than on what they are doing wrong. For the first one, college has always been designed for students to learn independently and in groups. The traditional lecture has been a small part of the learning effort. At its core, active learning is about teaching students how to do the work needed to learn. For the second one, mistakes are usually obvious because things do not “work out”. But when things fail, it is often not obvious what was “right” about the attempt. In order to learn from the failure, students need to know both the correct and incorrect actions, so informing them of what was correct is critical.

Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to understanding what improves outcomes. There is only the constant cycle of making incremental changes and evaluating changes in outcomes. For some changes, we already have good evidence of effectiveness. For others, we rely on lessons from past students to make educated guesses, but we still test the resulting outcomes. Part of the challenge is helping students to understand the connections between their actions and the outcomes they want. Sometimes, students seek “time-saving” approaches for skills that fundamentally take time to learn. In the end, there is no substitute for doing the work needed to learn.

This is where the lessons learned on the importance of diverse approaches come into play. Coordination and common goals matter, but the research shows that diversity improves outcomes and that applies to the academic experience as well. Supporting faculty in their innovative approaches and empowering them to reach their full creative potential is the best way to save money and improve policies.

Giving Faculty Space to Innovate and Lead

One of the most important lessons is to give people the room to be creative. Even if things do not work out, the attempt provides learning that helps move quickly to the next thing. It’s also important to remember that all technologies are tools. We must understand them, and then leverage them in the best way possible. At the end of the day, the role of instructors is to design an educational experience and then provide students with guidance through that experience. The experience needs to include clear articulation of the goals of what is to be learned and how each activity contributes to the goal, sources of information, opportunities for engagement and feedback on the activities. The internet and video technology has transformed how we deliver resources, information. Now, large language models are changing how feedback is provided to students. If used well, they can scale feedback and give students more of it.

I think the biggest challenge is helping faculty (instructors more broadly) understand their critical role in the education process. At its core, we are education experience designers and researchers. At our best, we understand what students need to learn, design experiences that optimize that learning, evaluate how well those experiences work and motivate students to engage in them. This is basically what coaches do. Even if the tools change, these central roles do not. The danger comes when we equate the experience we have previously designed, such as lectures, for the central element, when the core is the design of the experience.

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