On this week’s episode, Sean Michael Morris and I discuss Critical Instructional Design.

Sean is a digital teacher and pedagogue, with experience especially in networked learning, MOOCs, digital composition and publishing, collaboration, and editing. He’s been working in digital teaching and learning for 15 years. His work as a pioneer in the field of Critical Digital Pedagogy is founded in the philosophy of Paulo Freire, and finds contemporary analogues in the work of Howard Rheingold, Cathy N. Davidson, Dave Cormier, and Jesse Stommel. He is committed to engaging audiences in critical inspection of digital technologies, and to turning a social justice lens upon education. More

[Instructional Design] makes very mechanical the non-mechanical nature of teaching. Certain processes are put into place where the spontaneity is taken out of teaching. The relationship is taken out of teaching. The care and nurture of the student is taken out of teaching.

A lot of critical instructional design is questioning. It’s a matter of stepping back and observing and saying, “What are the assumptions of the LMS? What are the assumptions that I make and have been given to make about online learning? And how can I switch that up?”

I think there is a direct correlation between the amount of restrictions we place on students and their lack of interest in what we’re doing.

The more restrictions we place on learning, the less students have the ability to to explore it themselves.