1. Thinking differently about design
The OU Learning Design Initiative
Gráinne Conole
The Open University, UK

2. Focus for today
• Learning design - OULDI
▫ An evidence base – understanding, reflecting
▫ Compendium - creating, designing, reflecting
▫ Cloudworks - finding, communicating, reflecting
▫ Pedagogy schema - designing, reflecting
• Open Educational Resources – OLnet
▫ An evidence base for OER -
finding, creating, designing, communicating, refle
cting
▫ Fellowship schema
▫ Research projects
▫ Events and activities

3. Discussion
• What do you want out of this workshop?
▫ To learn about Compendiumld – how can we use
it in the classroom
▫ Ideas
▫ How to use Compendiumld and better ways of
designing activities
▫ How to integrate learning designing with training
in general without frightening the teachers!
▫ Some of the difficulties and how go about
addressing them!!!

4. Outcomes
• Overview of OU Learning Design Initiative
(OULDI) and Olnet
• Some hands-on exploration of tools and ideas
• A better understanding of the issues and
challenges of learning design
• Discussion of and refection on relevance to your
context

5. Paradoxes & conundrums
New technologies offer new pedagogical opportunities
Array of Not fully
technologies exploited
Potential for reuse with Open Educational Resources
Little evidence
Open Educational
of reuse
Resources

6. Solution?
Learning Design: Designing for learning
Guiding the design of learning activities
A means of describing A means
and representing of sharing
learning activities learning activities
To enhance the
New ways of thinking
learner experience
and innovating

7. Representing pedagogy
Empirical
evidence
base
Guiding design Sharing ideas

8. Bridge between
Resources and events Capture &
pedagogy & represent designs
technology
Tool development
Vision of enhancing the learner
Empirical
experience through pedagogically
evidence
informed, innovative use of technologies
Cloudworks CompendiumLD
Workshops Schema
Scaffold the Promote
Cloudfests Summits
design process sharing and reuse
Design challenges
Andrew Brasher, Paul Clark, Simon Cross, Juliette Culver, Martin Weller, Perry Williams

9. Facets of OULDI work
• Evidence base: Understanding the design
process
• Collaboration: Structured events for fostering
shared meaning and collaboration
• Representation: Tools to support different forms
of representation
• Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to
foster debate and sharing
• Reification: Abstraction and guidance through
schema for thinking differently

10. Learning activities
Teacher
Context
design
Learning
outcomes
Tasks
Assessment
Student
experience

11. Aspects of design
Learning
outcomes
Support
Tasks
Assessment

12. Facets of OULDI work
• Evidence base: Understanding the design
process
•
•
•
•

13. Evidence base: gathering data
Expert
brainstorming
Development of
support resources
Testing the tools!
Feedback, feedback,
feedback

14. Building an understanding about design
Case studies Use of tools
Design process
Interviews
In-depth
Design lifecycle
course evaluation
Futures visioning
Tools development
workshops
Trialling&
Workshops
evaluation

15. Case studies
Use of tools
in context
Ideas generation
& support mechanisms
Pedagogical
approaches
Representation
Barriers & enablers

16. Interviews
Expertise Existing
Barriers
& time processes
Shared vision
‘From the heart’
Process Representation
Interactive
design
The ‘big’ idea Support
Tacit nature Serendipity
Link to
Constraints
assessment
Evaluation

17. In-depth evaluation
Granularity
Design cycle of designs
Barriers &
Team dynamics
enablers
Multi-faceted

18. Design lifecycle
Gather Assemble
Vision Run
Evaluate
Adapt
ourse Course Course
onception delivery refinement
earning
Block Course
ctivity

19. Interview snapshots
I tend to sit and doodle a map
[Scrapbook] It’s in words, not will draw the logic and flow of
diagrams a dumping ground the course on paper and then
for thoughts – [to] capture thoughts go to compendium.
Scrapbooks & Then the problem is sharing it
doodle maps
Start from assessment
strategies and learning
I was building a sense of what the
outcomes and get an alignment
new course might be … we must
remember to do x, or a url of relevance
Holistic Mapping &
& atomistic connections
One of the difficulties is mapping the List of words clustered into blocks,
whole process I have tried to approach arrows...can you have clusters
course design using a holistic approach link to TMAs [Assignments]

20. Facets of OULDI work
•
• Collaboration: Structured events for fostering
shared meaning and collaboration
•
•
•

21. Collaboration: events
Cloudfests
Design challenge
Design summits Blurring real & virtual

22. Strategies for design
• How do you go about designing courses?
• Where do you get inspiration from?
• What tools, support, etc do you use?
• How do you represent your designs?
• How (or do) you share your ideas with others?
• How do you evaluate yours designs/know they
are any good?

23. Strategies for design
• Think about learning objectives
• Jot down ideas, extract info create an outline
and then attached activities, put all together
• First go through the content we want to
teach, then after set the goals we want to
achieve, then think what learning objects we
want to use or what tools we want to use, then
try it in the class, but also important to assess
and get feedback and reflect and improve

24. Design strategies
Design process creative,
messy, iterative
Different aspects – resources, Every teacher does
tools, outcomes, support, etc. it differently
No one perfect design tool
or approach
Different aspects to design -
focus and level of granularity
Serendipitous routes Sharing and reuse difficult,
to support but valuable

25. Facets of OULDI work
•
•
• Representation: Tools to support different forms
of representation
•
•

26. Representation: CompendiumLD

27. CompendiumLD
Core icon set
Design icon set

28. Building a design
Activity
Assignment
Outcome
Resource
Role
Stop
Task
Tool

29. Using a wiki to
analyse
a pop song for
English language
learning

31. In-situ help

32. Customised search

33. Time aggregation
Timings

34. Support templates

37. Activity
• Create a design in CompendiumLD
• Either choose a new activity you are planning or
map an existing activity
• Work in pairs and discuss your designs as you
are working

38. Facets of OULDI work
•
•
•
• Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to
foster debate and sharing
•

39. Connection: Cloudworks

40. Cloudworks
RSS feeds Follow and
be followed
Playlists
Friends
APIs
Many repositories of good practice,
but how do you develop the community???
Share
Embed
Comment
Aggregate

41. Vision & principles
Enable people to find, share & discuss
learning & teaching ideas
• Connectpeople with similar • People-orientated
interests
• Open site, open content
• Showcase work
• Provide a place for different • Target particular
communities communities
• Encourage sharing
• The site acting as a conduit
• Low barrier to entry

42. Cloudfests the person who’s
It would be very interesting to have
written the piece of teaching material, see what the people
at the coal face are doing with it!
If you notice things that are abstract, you can say: Oh, and
how did that work? or give me an example, I did one like this!
... It didn’t worry me that it was abstract. What worried me
was: how the hell does he make that work in an OU teaching
context!
The ones that started to catch my interest were where I could
quite quickly get a sense of a device or an approach... Within
two or three sentences, I kind of grasped what it was that they
had done and it caught my imagination.
It would be really good to have some sort of perspective from the people
who actually make things, because they’ve got a lot of experience about
(what) does and doesn’t work.

43. Clouds:
Learning and teaching ideas
Design or case studies
Tools or resources
Questions or problems
Cloudscapes:
Conferences
Workshops
Course team
Student cohort
Research theme
Project

48. Facets of OULDI work
•
•
•
•
• Reification: Abstraction and guidance through
schema for thinking differently

49. Reification: Schema
Thinking
Conversation&
demonstration
& reflection
Experience&
interaction
Evidence &
Thinking &
LIST of
reflection
LEARNINGP
activity
RINCIPLES
Experience Conversation
& activity & interaction
Evidence
& demonstration

50. Guiding
design
Schema
Deconstructing Mapping
Validating

51. Mapping activities to pedagogy
Blog as
Individual reflective diary
Blog collective
Information class resource
Passive Active
Experience
Social
Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. and Seale, J. (2004). 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective
learning design', Computers and Education, 43 (1-2), 17-33

52. Activity
• Locate the following on the framework
▫ Web search: students search the web and collate
resources against a given set of criteria
▫ Drill and practice: students work through a set of
resource and then complete a formative self-
assessment
▫ Debate: for and against debate, students choose a
side, post their views and read other postings
▫ Portfolio: students gather evidence against
learning outcomes into a portfolio

53. Thinking about learning
Thinking &
reflection
Four inter-connected
facets of learning
Experience
Communication
& activity
& interaction
Evidence &
demonstration
Dyke, Conole et al., (2007)

54. Thinking & Experience & Conversation & Evidence &
Principles reflection activity interaction demonstration
Aggregation of
Reflect on Mapping learning
learning
experience and activities against
activities
show goals
understanding
Frequent
interactive
exercises &
feedback
Provides
support for
independent
learning
Supports
collaborative
activities
Conole, 2008, New Schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies, Ariadne article

57. SocialLearn
Microlearn Making
Cloudwor
er connections
ksPull in and
Writes to and
imports publish
goals, resource relevant
s, stream courses/design
s
Profile
Pull in and
publish
relevant
Create
content
goals, tasks Publicise
study and
2Learner
learning story

59. A DNA print of designs
SociaLearn
OpenLearn
Different set of
principles
Different
mapping to
pedagogies

60. The 8LEM Hybrid model
•8LEM flashcards -
8LEM Hybrid model focusing on the student
activities
•8 student activities and a
set of verbs for what
teacher and student does
for each activity
• View the LEM
demonstration
http://cetl.ulster.ac.uk
/elearning/index.php?
page=8LEM-8
• Create a design using
the mapping grid
http://cetl.ulster.ac.uk
/elearning/documents
/grid.pdf

62. Mapping schema
CompendiumLD Generic tool
Topic OER
OER cycle Specialised tool
Resource
Schema
Design
VLE
Openlearn
Select Use
Google
Class aggregated
resources
Evaluate
Cloudworks
Researcher
User
Student survey
Analysis tools

63. Generic tool
Specialised tool
Resource
Schema
OER cycle

64. OLnet: towards a network...
People/networks
Meta-analysis/
synthesis
Tools, methods
approaches
Designs, evaluations,
case studies

65. Sites
• OULDI
▫ http://ouldi.open.ac.uk
• Cloudworks
▫ http://cloudworks.ac.uk
• CompendiumLD
▫ http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk
• Olnet
▫ http://olnet.org

66. References
• Conole, G., De Laat, M., Dillon, T. and Darby, J.
(2008), ‘Disruptive technologies’, ‘pedagogical innovation’:
What’s new? Findings from an in-depth study of students’ use
and perception of technology’, Computers and
Education, Volume 50, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 511-524.
• Conole, G. (in press), Stepping over the edge: the implications
of new technologies for education in M. Lee and C. McLouglin
(forthcoming), Web 2.0-based e-learning: applying social
informatics for tertiary teaching, ICI Global: Hersey, PA
• Conole, G., Culver, J., Well, M., Williams, P., Cross, S., Clark, P.
and Brasher, A. (2008), Cloudworks: social networking for
learning design, Ascilite Conference, 30th Nov – 3rd Dec
2008, Melbourne.

67. References
• Conole, G. and McAndrew, P. (accepted), A new approach
to supporting the design and use of OER: Harnessing the
power of web 2.0, M. Edner and M. Schiefner
(eds), Looking toward the future of technology enhanced
education: ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.
• Conole, G., Brasher, A., Cross, S., Weller, M., Clark, P. and
White, J. (2008), Visualising learning design to foster and
support good practice and creativity, Educational Media
International, Volume 54, Issue 3, 177-194.
• Conole, G. (2008), New schema for mapping pedagogies
and
technologies, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/
• Conole, G. (in press), Research methodological issues with
researching the learner voice, in Handbook of Research on
New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: issues and
challenges, L. T. W. Hin and R. Subramaniam (Eds), IGI
Global: Hershey, PA