All posts by Kevin Lyon

Avatar photo

About Kevin Lyon

Kevin is a Double-Demon, receiving his Bachelor's degree in English with a minor in Professional Writing from DePaul in 2009, and staying on for his Master's in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse with dual concentrations in Technical and Professional Writing and Teaching Writing and Language. He is an now an Instructional Technology Consutlant and a Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse instructor. His research interests include technology in education, education and identity formation/negotiation, and online learning and interaction.

Beginning to Integrate a Framework for AI Literacy Into Existing Heuristics
Avatar photo

Beginning to Integrate a Framework for AI Literacy Into Existing Heuristics

Within education, we are likely familiar with the many cognitive models and heuristics used to depict learning stages or provide frameworks for approaching the art and science of teaching. Bloom’s Taxonomy, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development, and many other models and theories provide conceptualizations of individual steps, thoughts, stages, or actions to be taken in the internalization and mastery of concepts in education, both for students and instructors. It seems a natural progression then that a similar framework would begin to develop in the age of artificial intelligence that helps instructors and students alike understand the stages of development or work to be done in understanding, testing, and applying AI workflows to our current states of learning and teaching. Continue reading →

Teaching in Tough Times: How to Counter Languishing and Burnout in Higher Education. An image of a match burning down then becoming a seedling.
Avatar photo

Teaching in Tough Times: How to Counter Languishing and Burnout in Higher Education

A quick note before I move into the post–if you find that your feelings run deeper than just your work, or that the challenges you face are pervasive or problematic across other areas of your life, I would encourage you to seek professional counseling or therapy with a licensed mental health professional beyond the recommendations for approaching your work outlined below.

We all likely know the feeling by now, even if we might still lack the specific terminology to explain it. We’re tired, despite sleeping relatively well. We’re feeling “off,” but we’re not sick. We’re feeling lonely or disconnected, though we still get along with our coworkers and students. We may forget project details or course deadlines, or just find it hard to be excited about starting a new endeavor or covering topics in the classroom that once interested us. Is this burnout, or something else? Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Best Practices for Video Use in Instructional Design

“We can just record my existing PowerPoint slides.”

The phrase always sends shivers down my spine.  Not because recording PowerPoint slides isn’t effective, as in some situations it can still be useful, but because of the seemingly flippant attitude of the “just” part.  If only it were that easy, and a recorded PowerPoint was the end-all solution for online learning.

This is always where we start our conversation that, in essence, defines my ethics of video lectures in instructional design.  This is a very loose framework, and not necessarily based on any particular theory I’ve encountered, but rather through observations of multitudes of online courses using various approaches to content delivery and seeing what works based on the course and the context.  Simply deploying a “video” isn’t really that simple.

Recently, I heard a phrase that I think sums this up nicely: “You haven’t yet mastered a tool until you understand when not to use it.” Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Aligning Goals: Simple Structures for Student Transfer and Reviewer Clarity

Since we apply the Quality Matters (QM) rubric to the review of our courses, we typically view the interactions between the elements of the course as “alignment”—the idea that these pieces all flow through or stem from one another, allowing a reviewer and instructor to see the connection of these elements throughout the course. While we have various ways of demonstrating this alignment (numbering and sub-numbering, parenthetical reference, etc.), these tend to be used internally, mostly shared between the instructor, the instructional designer, and the review teams. Rarely do we share this full concept of alignment with students—but why? If we build for structure and scaffolding of the lessons throughout the course, wouldn’t it also be beneficial to students to see ways of connecting the various course objectives with the module objectives, readings, assessments, and other activities?

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Improve Your Video Lecture Production with Free Open Source Software

I’ve recently gotten into a “maker” mindset, becoming more and more interested in the concept of makerspaces, hackerspaces, and generally improving my ability to make, repair, or upcycle the things I use on a daily basis. Besides using my wife’s broken laptop charge port as a big impetus to learn to solder, or installing various Linux distributions on various old computers or single board computers I have, I’ve been spending time watching YouTube channels of various makers or Linux podcasts. One thing I’ve noticed is that the video production of these channels is often very good, even when they seem like shoestring productions.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

READY STUDENT ONE? Risks and Rewards of VR and AR in the College Classroom

While I’ll beg your forgiveness for the obvious hype-train connection in my title to the release of the film READY PLAYER ONE, the film does raise many questions about the future of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). For me, this question often comes up in the context of VR and AR in education, since my work as an Instructional Designer often means looking at new technologies that could change the way we go about the task of learning and teaching. Our office recently started a working group together with partners across the university to begin exploring what VR and AR in education could look like.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Imposter Syndrome, Creation and Negotiation of Identity, and Freshman Fear of Failing

“What if they find out who I really am?”

Every quarter, I meet a new group of (mostly) freshmen students in my First Year Writing courses, and every quarter, there’s one conversation I can’t wait to have. I always make sure that we have a discussion of “Discourse Communities” and what it means to become a “professional” within any of the fields the students might be studying.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Getting Your Head in the Cloud: 5 Tips on Distributed Data and Discipline

Our institution recently (generously/mercifully) provided the entire university access to Box.com, an unlimited online cloud storage solution. While many in our office were already pro subscribers of Dropbox or Office 365/OneDrive, the addition of an officially available solution for all faculty, staff, and students opened many, many opportunities—but brought a few challenges as well.

Some of the users we’ve worked with following the release were already familiar with cloud storage solutions, which also means they are well aware of the “data discipline” required when you have near limitless (or in our case, actually limitless) storage that can span across physical hardware setups and locations. However, some who were new to this, or just those who—let’s just say “have trouble with cleaning up” their files—needed a bit of a primer on data discipline and how to avoid the digital dumping ground.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Raspberry Pi and the Benefits of Diving into the Deep End

Raspberry Pi logoRecently, on “Pi Day” (3.14, or March 14 for the non-nerds out there) I was reading an article about the benefits of learning programming on the Raspberry Pi, a micro-computer that costs only $35 dollars, and all the ways that it helps tinkerers learn programming and solve obscure issues by creating their own software and hardware solutions. I had recently fallen into the trap of tech lust—the feeling nerds get when they suddenly want to buy some piece of technology they may or may not really need—and decided that I wanted to buy a Pi device and get back into programming, having not written a line of code since high school.

That last bit presented a bit of an issue for me, however. Learning to code was always easiest for me when I had a specific issue to solve, since it helped me predict what kind of code I needed to learn, while also making the motivational factor much easier to maintain. It’s this feeling of not knowing where to start that I often see students struggle with as well.

Facing this issue myself, before I decide which Pi to purchase I’ll look online for specific Pi projects that others have done, to see what solutions I may be able to integrate into my own network and test bench at home. At the same time, I think it is helpful to consider the different pedagogical approaches available to instructors to naturally integrate problems into the assignments we give, in order to help students learn to solve them.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Delving into Design

Recently, while filling out one of those mundane online forms that asks general demographic info like education level, industry, and various demographics, I was a bit puzzled that within the preconfigured options for occupation, my exact title of “Instructional Technology Consultant” wasn’t an option, though “Instructional Designer” was.

I admit now that I shouldn’t really have reason to take pause. For most of the ITCs I work with, instances like this wouldn’t faze them at all. I’m well aware that our nomenclature doesn’t really change the fact that what we do is, in fact, instructional design. Yet I have to admit that before that moment I’d never really seen myself as a designer—at least not in the sense of what people think of when they traditionally think of a “designer.” Consultant? Sure, I can easily recognize myself there, but not as a designer.

Continue reading →