Title: Week 6: Part 1 - Reflection and design process
Course: Blended learning and distance education skills > Section: Course Content

The whole development process and all materials developed need to be reflected on to maximize the personal learning effect.  Questions to ask yourself focus on for example: ‘What were the ideas I had before starting the design process?, What do I think now?, What did I learn?’.

The second part is more focused on thinking about a complete course in a distance education format. What are the implications for the design? Problems, opportunities, resources, and the role of the teacher are some of the things that have to be thought about.

After this week you will be able to:

- Explain in his/her own words what was learned from the design process and designed products using the reflection methodology supplied.
- Give a justified description of the design consequences for a distance education format.

Reflection on your design process and designed products

Reflection means that you look into the mirror to become well aware of how you operate, which choices you make, which skills you use and how that feels. After realizing this, you can form an opinion about the result of your actions: is it in accordance with your original goal and what do you think about the results? As a final step, you can state intentions about what you are going to do (different) in the future. Very often this looking back on your actions and the result of that action, leads to different actions in the future. Reflection is thus, in a way, a means to overcome the next pitfall:

“If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got”. (source: From: Leren en doceren in het hoger onderwijs, H16 reflecteren op onderwijs, (Kallenberg e.a., 2009))

There are several methods for reflection. The ‘reflection cycle of Korthagen’ is a simple and effective method you can use.

The reflection cycle of Korthagen (Korthagen, 1982, 1992)

The cycle consists of the following phases:

1. Action: first, think about what you want to achieve, and then think about alternative actions, followed by a choice for one alternative.
2. Looking back: you describe what you said and/or did, as concrete as possible. Furthermore, you give the results of your actions, which in most cases is the action of other people. You then describe how you responded to this reaction.
3. Realization: think about why you said/did what you said/did, what is the relation between the students‟ reactions, and what I did (both before as well as after the students' reactions). If possible this phase gives an explanation of the reactions between you as a teacher and the students.
4. Developing alternatives: you think about alternative ways of responding in the same situation, including a possible reaction by the students. Like: “if I would do this, then what could happen?” From these alternatives, you choose the best option and write it down as specific as possible.
5. The actual execution of this chosen alternative, which is in fact phase 1 of the next cycle.

Based on: University Teaching Qualification (UTQ) Manual, August 2019 available at this website.

Use the following reflection template to reflect on your design process.

If you need help or need feedback, please share your document with the trainers via e-mail.