READING CHECK #2: What is a concept?

What is a concept?

A concept is a category that can be applied to things that are similar, like a group of objects, or a group of theories. The same concept can be used with all of the items in the group.

Think about your experience as a teacher/trainer or even a learner. How have you taught or learned a concept? Give an example.

In my line of work, I often will be involved in projects that rely on developers with different skill sets, and different programming languages of expertise. Some of the developers may work with the underlying infrastructure that all of our websites are built on, while others may be the ones programming the websites on said infrastructure.

However, when working with different types of developers, there are some concepts that apply to code, regardless of the language. Some of the common concepts we may use are “scalability”, “supportability”, and “level of effort”. Our code must always be “scalable”, meaning if we do it for one client, we need to be able to do it for hundreds of clients. This means it needs to be easy to implement for each of the clients. The code also must be “supportable”. With programming, there will almost always be a necessity to update or upgrade the code. An example would be if a browser changes the way it handles a Javascript function, or drops support for this function. Users could experience a broken website. Another concept of coding is “level of effort”. How many hours will it take to complete the project? When does the project have to be completed? This will determine how many developers will need to work on it. I also like to look at the “value” that will be achieved, once the project is completed in order to make sure that the “level of effort” doesn’t outweigh the “value” - that the “juice is worth the squeeze”.

How would you use your knowledge of concept learning in developing instruction?

When developing instruction, I look at who the audience will be. Once I’ve determined all of the audiences, I will look at the concepts that will be taught, and determine how they relate to each team. I will keep all of the concept definitions generic enough that they can apply to each team, but will show some examples of the concept being applied to each. An example of this would be the presentation on persuasive communication that I completed last semester and presented to our department. As a department, we have established a set of soft skills that each team member should develop in order to help them in their jobs. Persuasive communication is one of those soft skills. I had to teach a variety of different teams what meant to use persuasive communications, and how they could apply it to their work. The team included copywriters, designers, developers and project managers, so the concept had to be broad enough to include each team, but detailed enough to help them understand the concept and how to apply it to their day-to-day work. I was able to explain what persuasive communication is, and then allow the team to discuss how it would be used in different scenarios by different teams.