Introduction to B-Learning

In his speech in Waterloo University, Bill Gates mentioned that software designers and producers need to ask people: How can software help you?

 

If you ask us: ‘How can B-learning help me?’ We will answer:

 

If you are an instructional designer/human performance technologist

B-learning can help you learn how to design a learning/performance solution with a set of approaches that you probably have never seen in other places. You might have seen some of the approaches in other places, but you probably have never seen the whole set of approaches in one single place, in the systematical, flexible, and humane way, like in B-learning.

 

You will not have to read lots of journal articles to figure out what these articles are talking about before you did not truly understand ‘the basic language of learning science’. You will apply principles into your practice in a systematic and appropriate way, to the maximized degree.

 

You will not make some mistakes without being identified by yourself or others, without getting in-time feedbacks. There are many types of feedbacks that you can get in B-learning; and these feedbacks will be communicated to you in a way truly understandable to you.

 

B-learning understands the difficulties faced by novice instructional designers, and knows how to help novice designers learn the basic language of learning science. With the assistance of B-learning, designers can speed up their developing of instructional design (ID) expertise.

 

B-learning sometimes plays the role of a coach; sometimes plays the role of a partner; sometimes plays the role of a discoverable environment; and sometimes plays the role of a communicating platform. It is often up to you and your teachers to choose the types of help that you need most from B-learning.

 

B-learning can automate some ID decision making processes, so that designers can save time in doing other more important tasks. However, B-learning goes beyond being a non-flexible expert-system. B-learning shows you the inner operating logic of the ‘automated parts’, in an explicit and understandable way, so you can choose to learn how experts have embedded these knowledge and skills into B-learning.

 

B-learning believes that most knowledge has the nature of being mutually agreed and being provisional, so B-learning promotes and facilitates the open discussing and developing of knowledge. For every concept, rule, function, map, game, task template, course, certificate and other components of B-learning, it is open for all types of opinions/feedbacks.

 

You will see how the relative-current B-learning-embedded knowledge is formed with the corresponding reasoning processes and supportive proofs. B-learning encourages you to give your reasoning, in a way as logical and detailed as possible. B-learning creates the semi-structured feedback collecting system, so you will choose the way that is most appropriate for you to give feedbacks, to contribute to the progress of learning science.

 

B-learning knows that there are both regularities and diversities in our world. So B-learning tries to help people figure out the useful regularities and diversities in learning science. Design-based research, data-warehouse and data-mining are potential helpful ways to figure out regularities and diversities. B-learning tries to create the best data-structure as early as possible in each phase, and after collecting & evaluating some data, B-learning will try to adjust the data-structure in time.

 

Learning cell, learning pattern, and learning economics are three conceptual tools that are coined by B-leaning, and can help B-learning establish the first-version of data-structure. Learning cell is the basic unit of learning analysis. Learning cell is used to identify the basic dimensions/variables in learning science.

Learning pattern is used to identify the possible values for each dimension or variable; learning pattern is also used to identify the possible ways of grouping different dimensions together, and discover some predictable patterns.

 

Learning economics is used to understand learning science from an analogical situation as in economics. There will be more detailed discussion on these three concepts in later issues, or you can check online. Some ideas about Learning Economics is presented in this issue.

 

You might ask: as an instructional designer, why should I care about all the theoretical sides? Because every instructional designer should be an educational researcher, just like every teacher or learner should be an educational researcher too. The collective progress of learning science will empower you more powerful instructional design tools, so contributing to this progress should be the duty of every designer.

 

Moreover, with going a step further, being a researcher, instructional designer, teacher, & learner are just four roles that should be played by every single person, in different times, to different degrees. You will see the detailed discussion about this role-playing in the Learning Economics part.

 

If you are a teacher/trainer/tutor

B-learning can help you systematically apply ID (Instructional Design) into your teaching practice. Most teachers don’t conduct systematic ID activities in their practice. B-learning believes that instructors can enhance their teaching practice greatly with adapting ID activities systematically.

 

If you are a learner

B-learning can help you become a better learner through teaching you how to learn, through helping you embed ‘your learning about how to learn’ into your learning other subject matters. B-learning believes the collective metaphors about teaching students about learning how to learn: (the learning metaphor + the developing metaphor) as a whole metaphor.

 

If you are a educational researcher,

Just like any designer should be a researcher, any researcher should be a designer too. Refer to the designer part to see how B-learning can help you.