Learning and Instruction in the Digital Age

摘要

To become a professional a person has to acquire knowledge and skills. The transfer of the specific knowledge and skills is organized and accredited within an institution as a school or a university. How people learn and what institutions can do to enhance learning is the major focus of research in the field of learning and instruction. The design of processes and resources for facilitating learning is the object of research of instructional technology. Working in the field of instructional technology for 25 years and having designed three major applications for learning legal tasks as solving legal cases (legal assessment), structuring and analyzing decisions by judges and selecting and stating facts, we now take the opportunity to describe what we think is a major issue in learning and instruction in the Digital Age, an issue that should be the main focus in. developing instructional materials. We state that in designing instructional materials it is important to work in a principled and structured way. This may sound as a truism, however, we think it cannot be emphasized enough that using an explicit methodology for design can contribute to theory formation in the field of learning and in the field of instruction, it may also support theory formation in the domain at stake, in our case law, and it may result in materials that are properly evaluated and as such improve instruction and enhance learning. In this paper we describe a methodology for the design of resources for effective learning in the Digital Age. We illustrate the methodology by describing the design of our coaching system for learning legal case solving.