PROGRAM COHESION and LEARNABLE MOMENTS The second important principle I have learned from my projects is program cohesion.

You could replace the word program with interface, solution, project, team, organization, etc. If your solution and all elements around your solution are designed under the principle of cohesion, your solution will probably carry much more value and have a longer life time in an ecosystem. The cohesion principle comes down all the way to how to design an interface, feature, system message, clickable button, swiping or touching gesture, or even color scheme of your user interface. If your solution is not designed under the cohesion principle, your solution may cause cognitive overload, confusion, and/or disorientation for users, leading to a shorter life time or no life time at all. Everything you do in order to design your solution must be aligned with your one fundamental difference you want to make. This means getting the right kind of elements at the right level and making sure the theme, color, look and feel, types of activities, texts, graphics, and layouts are all cohesive with the fundamental feature of your solution. Also, the necessary steps, procedures, and sequence of your contents are logical and intuitive. On top of all that, if your team is cohesive in designing, developing, and working together, your organization is more likely to be successful as well. Therefore, the cohesion principle applies not only down to your simple color scheme of your user interface design, but all the way up to the organizational cohesion level. The more cohesive everything is, the higher chance of successfully designing and launching your project and sustaining it.

The third principle I learned is about focusing on generating learnable moments? I will call it learnable moment principle. First of all, what is a learnable moment? There are different levels of learnable moments. If you already heard about Blooms taxonomy or Edgar Dales cone of experience, the examples here will be much easier to understand. If you havent heard about these terms, I suggest you search them on Internet and find out what they are and make your own judgment about them. Here are some examples of learnable moments in a very simplified version. As a teacher, you can say something so your students can memorize what was said and recite if your students still remember. You can also show an example when you say something so your students can see and hear at the same time. You can also give your students something to examine, but not explaining so your students are to investigate and figure things out by themselves. This is about triggering curiosity and turning on students experiential learning switch. You can also give your students a problem and ask your students to create something to solve the problem so they can experiment their creation and compare own solutions with others. This is about helping students experience the sense of achievement by creating an artifact and presenting their rationale. This last example would be at a much higher level of learnable moment than the very first one. Although these examples are quite simplified and there could be many more, these represent different levels of learnable moments. What typically happens in traditional classrooms of today is that teachers explain things and students memorize them to take an exam. This passive engagement model often applies to even online learning or mobile learning models today. Teachers still explain things live or through recorded videos and students memorize them for testing.

In this course, you will notice that there is no quiz or exam. Instead, you produce, you construct, you design, you reflect on your own learning, you present, and you evaluate your peers work and compare with your work. You will see that active engagement is required throughout the course. Also, you will notice that you construct various digital artifacts while working with your peers in your teams. Therefore, a lot of efficient collaboration is needed. The capability of efficiently and effectively collaborating to learn is one of important competencies I promote in this class. By doing so, you will identify and develop multimodal communication and teambuilding strategies in this class. Overall, when there is a higher level learnable moment and higher level active engagement, you are more likely to be able to apply your learning experience in a new situation or to solve a new problem. When you learn to collaborate, you get to do things you couldnt possibly do alone. I will go over this team performance matter later when I talk about my research on collective intelligence. But for now, let me say this. I promote a collaborative work environment because every student knows something and nobody knows everything and nobody can do everything alone. Therefore, what any one student knows can be leveraged and amplified by the students as a team. At the same time, when you work as a team, your team can often create novel and unexpected mixture of knowledge and product in ways that individual students alone could not. The keywords here are higher level of learnable moments, higher level of active engagement, and higher level of collaboration. As I said in an earlier video, if your teams final design triggers and facilitates active, constructive,

real-world problem-solving, and collaborative learning with the 21st communication media available for your learners, your design will receive more attention from evaluators and your instructor.