1. What is learning design?
The implicit nature of teaching practice
Design is an inherent part of any teacher’s practice (i.e. preparing for teaching
sessions or creating learning materials, activities and assessments). Indeed, it is so
core to what they do it is often taken for granted. It is assumed that it ‘just happens’.
In other words, design is so embedded in a teacher’s practice that it tends to be
implicit – not formally articulated, or externalised for others, apart from at a
relatively superficial level in the course syllabus or lesson plan.
Once you start to focus on learning design and, in particular, try to understand what
design is and how it occurs, a number of questions come to mind.
• How do teachers prepare their teaching materials and/or teaching sessions?
• What decisions do they make?
• How do they decide which activities, resource and technologies to
incorporate?
• Where do they get advice and help on the process?
These are some of the questions we will ask you to consider as you read through this
Resource.
A critical eye on the design process
The focus of this resource is to look critically at the design process. The sheer
quantity and variety of new technologies available, and the ways in which they can
be used to support learning and teaching, presents a daunting prospect to teachers
wanting to use these technologies in effective and innovative ways. In particular
there is a need for a better understanding of the design process and clearer
mechanisms to help guide teachers in making decisions about the creation of new
learning activities.
The activities, resources, and tools in the training module will give you a brief
overview of new approaches to design that help teachers and designers to make
choices on how to incorporate new technologies to facilitate learning activities. The
module will provide an overview of the issues associated with designing for learning
– what it means, and what the advantages and the difficulties are.
The design process
You will get the opportunity to try out different ways of thinking about the design
process that can be used to help teachers map the pedagogy, technologies and
activities students are intended to undertake. You will also look at how design ideas
can be represented and shared and, in particular, the advantages and disadvantages

2. of different forms of representation. You will have the chance to explore different
tools for planning designs.
Why focus on design at all?
In recent years there has been a growing interest in trying to better understand
teachers’ design processes and to make them more explicit.
There are a number of reasons for this, but two are particularly worth noting.
1. By making the design process more explicit it can be more easily shared with
others, which means good practice can be transferred.
2. There is now such a diversity of resources and technologies available, which
can potentially be used to support the teaching process that teachers need
clearer guidance to help them find relevant tools and resources and find
support on how to incorporate the tools and resources into the learning
activities they are creating.
‘Learning design’ is the term most commonly used to describe the research and
development activities associated with a better understanding of the process
involved in designing learning activities and which support teachers’ design
practices. However, it should be noted that the term is not without controversy and
overlaps to some extent with other terms, such as instructional design, curriculum
design and course design.
While some people prefer to use other terms, such as ‘educational design’,
‘instructional design’ or ‘curriculum/course design’, all the terms tend to focus on
the importance of ‘design’. This is regarded as a good term around which to reclaim
the scholarship of teaching and to rethink pedagogy for a digital age and in the new
information economy (Beetham and Sharpe, 2007).
Why design is becoming increasingly
important
So why is it important to pay so much attention to the design process? Precisely
because it is core to the teaching process and to the ultimate learning experience
students have as a result of how a teaching session or some learning materials are
designed. In the creation of learning materials either for independent study or
mediated by a tutor, the impact of good design makes itself felt immediately. Often
working intuitively or with tacit knowledge, the expert teacher can produce the
apposite example to illustrate a complex concept. Or they can advise on the use of
formative assessment at the appropriate point in a long chain of argumentation to
anchor a critical perception in a student’s mind. Learning design aims to move the
pedagogic skills of the expert teacher from the realm of tacit to explicit knowledge
and to capture the essence of that knowledge for reuse in other contexts by other
staff.

3. ‘Learning activities’ and ‘learning design’
Two key concepts, ‘learning activities’ and ‘learning design’, are central to the topics
covered in the module and it is worth defining these concepts from the outset.
Learning activities are those tasks that students undertake to achieve a set of
intended outcomes. Examples might include:
• Finding and synthesising a series of resources from the web
• Contributing to a ‘for and against debate’ in a discussion forum
• Manipulating data in a spreadsheet
• Constructing a group report in a wiki
• Summarising the salient points of a podcast.
Beetham views learning activities in relation to the design process ‘as a specific
interaction of learner(s) with other(s) using specific tools and resources, orientated
towards specific outcomes’. (Beetham in Beetham and Sharpe, 2007, p.28)
Learning design refers to the range of actions associated with creating a learning
activity and crucially provides a means of describing learning activities. The term
learning design can refer to:
• The process of planning, structuring and sequencing learning activities,
• The product of the design process – the documentation, representation(s),
plan, or structure) created either during the design phase or later.
Agostinho (2006) describes it as ‘a representation of teaching and learning practice
documented in some notational format so that it can serve as a model or template
adaptable by a teacher to suit his/her context’.
Learning design provides a means of guiding the creation of learning activities, as
well as representing learning activities so that they can be shared between tutors
and designers. For example, this might consist of illustrating learning activities in an
easy to understand way (as a diagram and/or text) so that they can:
• Be shared between a teacher and a designer
• Be repurposed from one teacher to another
• Serve as a means of scaffolding the process of creating new learning
activities
• Provide the tools for practitioners to capture their innovative practice in a
form that is not only easy to share but also gives them ownership of the
problem and solution. Such a scaffold might be in the form of an online tool
to provide support and guidance to a teacher in the steps involved in creating
a new learning activity – including tips and hints on how they might use
particular tools.
Learning design therefore refers to a range of activities associated with better
describing, understanding, supporting and guiding pedagogic design practices and

4. processes. It is about supporting teachers in managing and responding to new
perspectives, pedagogies, and work practices resulting, to a greater or lesser extent,
from new uses of technology to support teaching and learning.
Learning design aims to enable reflection, refinement, change and communication
by focusing on forms of representation, notation and documentation. This can:
• Make the structures of intended teaching and learning – the pedagogy –
more visible and explicit thereby promoting understanding and reflection
• Serve as a description or template, which can be adaptable or reused by
another teacher to suit his/her own context
• Add value to the building of shared understandings and communication
between those involved in the design and teaching process
• Promote creativity.
Learning design can take place at a number of levels: from the creation of a specific
learning activity, through the sequencing and linking of activities and resource, to
the broad curriculum and programme levels. Conceptually, there is a growing
appreciation, borne out by research at The Open University (UK) and elsewhere, that
learning design has an important role throughout the teaching and learning process;
from design and production, through the delivery of learning and sharing designs
with students, to evaluation and sharing practice.
To some extent, teachers already engage in some form of learning design, such as
planning a lecture or using a table to map learning objectives to assessment criteria.
However, as technologies, pedagogies and working practices change, many believe
that a greater formality in existing design practices, processes and support needs to
be developed. A number of groups are working on learning design research and
practice. The range of learning design approaches offers something for both
teachers/lecturers and those in support or mediatory roles (e.g. instructional
designers and others seeking learning and teaching solutions).
Different interpretations of ‘learning
design’
‘Learning design’ as a term originated in the technical community and began to gain
prominence around 2004, following the development of an educational mark-up
language at the Open University of the Netherlands. This was taken as the basis for
attempting to create a learning design specification as part of a broader body of
work on technical specifications by the IMS consortium (http://www.imsglobal.org).
The aim of this formal specification was to provide a framework for describing
teaching strategies and learning objectives in a method that allows easy interchange
between elearning providers. The capitalised term ‘Learning Design’ is sometimes
used to refer to this more technical approach. Only limited implementations of the
full specification have yet been realised and as an approach it does not tend to make
pedagogic design and learner activity explicit in a human-readable form.

5. However, since then the term has been appropriated by others and as such there is
some confusion surrounding it because it has become popular as an expression that
in a more general sense is synonymous with instructional or course design, for
example, someone might ask ‘What is the learning design underlying this course?’
They do not expect to be presented with XML code when they ask this, but are
seeking some rationale behind the course design, for example, an explanation that
relates learning outcomes to pedagogy and content.
This extension of the term partly reflects the interest the specification has
generated. In order to distinguish between a more general use of the term and
reference to the IMS specification itself some suggest the convention of using
‘learning design’ (small ‘l’, small ‘d’) when talking about the general concept and
‘Learning Design’ (capital ‘L’ and ‘D’) when referring to the concept as implemented
in the IMS specification.
A second approach to learning design adopts a more general interpretation of
learning design – one that focuses on pedagogy and the activity of the student rather
than, say, the content. This approach advocates a process of ‘design for learning’ by
which one arrives at a plan, structure or design for a learning situation, where
support is realised through tools that support the process (e.g. software applications,
websites) and resources that represent the design (e.g. designs of specific cases,
templates).
Beetham suggests the primary focus should be on the activities undertaken by
learners. That is to say, not just the tasks required of learners but thinking about
how learners, each with their own way of proceeding, engage as active participants
in these tasks. This means greater emphasis on understanding and codifying the
components and relationships within learning experiences, be these specific
‘learning activities’ or an entire curriculum. An example of this approach may see a
designer give an explanation that relates learning outcomes to learner activity to
pedagogy to content. The lower case term ‘learning design’ is often used to refer to
this approach although there remains ambiguity in use.
The value of learning design as an
approach
At this point you may still be wondering ‘what on earth is learning design and why
should I be interested in learning about it?’ You can think of it as a fancy word for
what you were doing every day of your professional life, working out what you were
going to teach and how you were going to teach it. The difference is that with firstly
distance learning, and now e-learning, teachers have had to make that process more
explicit, because without face-to-face contact you can’t fix things on the fly if they
start going wrong.
This is the view Beetham takes in her chapter (p.37) when she talks about the
possibility of learning design existing as unarticulated shared expertise. The point is
to become aware of it, to do it better and, of course, to share the practice and the
results.

6. There are significant advantages in the instilling of the tenets of good design across
the teaching and support staff of an educational institution or within a training
context:
• A clearer perception by the teacher of good examples of teaching or learning
support
• More efficient use of the teacher’s time
• More efficient and effective learning on the part of students
• More useful sharing of pedagogic insights across the teaching and support
staff, and across disciplines.
Learning design seeks to provide tools and support that can help those involved in
teaching and learning respond to changes – be these constraints on time and
resource, greater choice in technology and pedagogies, the blurring of the real and
virtual, and shifting roles – and stakeholders involved in planning and delivering
courses. When teaching at a distance, there may be particular benefits due to the
even greater need for rigorous planning, design and evaluation before delivery to
students.
Furthermore, in making a design more explicit, learning design encourages greater
focus on what the student is doing – their learning experience and activity. It also
asks questions about how design occurs, what decisions do teachers make? What is
their process? For both the individual practitioner and for universities, this may
support more efficient use of time, more effective teaching and learning, better
economy of effort, clearer perceptions of good practice and the change to alternate
forms of course delivery (for example, the ways of visualising the virtual hyperlinked
learning landscape in an online course).
Several tools have been developed to help the designer/practitioner, and if you wish
to investigate further they can be found at:
• The JISC Design for Learning Programme supported a variety of projects that
developed tools for guiding, implementing and evaluating learning design
including the London Pedagogy Planner and the Phoebe Pedagogic Planner)
• The OU now with the support of the JISC Curriculum Design Programme (until
2012), are developing two tools, CompendiumLD and Cloudworks
• The RELOAD project is building a suite of software tools for authoring and
delivering standard-compliant learning objects
• The LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) Foundation has produced
a platform for teachers to create, deliver and run online sequences of
learning activities in real-time with students.
Links to some learning design tools
• Cloudworks: http://www.cloudworks.ac.uk/
• CompendiumLD: http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk/
• Phoebe Pedagogic Planner: http://phoebe-project.conted.ox.ac.uk/
• London Pedagogy Planner: http://www.wle.org.uk/d4l

7. • Learning Activity Management System (LAMS):
http://www.lamsfoundation.org/
• RELOAD: http://www.reload.ac.uk/
Capturing practice
To aid the perception, capture and communication of good teaching practice (in a
form that can be easily read and digested) requires the creation of a textual or visual
‘space’ and within it a ‘vocabulary’ of pedagogical elements in terms of which the
examples can be described. From there the rules of combination of these elements,
to create a learning task and groups of such tasks, have to be articulated.
What is captured depends to some extent on the intended audience for the design.
For example, the same ‘design’ would need to be represented in different ways to a
technical developer, a teacher or a student. A technical developer tasked with
converting the design into a set of web pages needs different information to that
required by a teacher who wants to use the design as the basis for setting up an
activity, or that required by a student who wants to work through the elements of
the design.
What are the drawbacks?
Learning design has already attracted much interest but remains an emerging field at
the edge of mainstream practice. There are a variety of evolving issues and
challenges.
1. For researchers there are theoretical and methodological challenges
associated with understanding what is a very complex process, ranging from
questions about how it should researched?, modelled? Or made sense of? to
what definitions and vocabularies are used. Other challenges relate to the
impact and consequences of the approach. For example, Peter Goodyear
writing in the Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects
(Lockyer et al. (eds), 2009) asks if the very focus on ‘learning’ means we are
inadvertently complicit in helping learners abdicate their responsibilities for
learning.
2. Representations of learning designs can vary in their form, role, granularity
and level of abstractness, and the choice of tool or platform may
constrain/inform the approach used. Such variation introduces vibrancy to
the field but also presents practical and theoretical challenges, which may
appear difficult to reconcile. For example, how to resolve the tension
between the desire to represent learning design in the abstract as some form
of ‘pattern’ or practice model and the need to convey the contextual
specificity of a design as realised in a particular case? Or, how can
representations satisfy the need to represent a short, specific activity but also
show its place in, and contribution to, an entire curriculum? At present there

8. is no singular agreement regarding representations or languages for learning
design.
3. Learning design will be organised and embedded within established cultural
and social practices and so practitioners will encounter it from many
standpoints. There may be some concerns, for example, about the time
required for the design process (although ideally it should be the quality of
design that should take precedence and it is likely that time will be saved
later in the process). Others may be uncertain about issues of ownership,
how best to share, how to become proficient in skills of notation and
representation and how to externalise and articulate practice.
Summing up so far…
So, learning design refers to the range of activities associated with creating a
learning activity and crucially provides a means of describing learning activities.
Internationally, a number of research groups are actively working in the area of
learning design. They are trying to find ways to help teachers create better learning
experiences for students, which are pedagogically grounded and make innovative
use of new technologies.
Cross and Conole provide a simple overview of the evolution of the term; see http://
cloudworks.ac.uk/ index.php/ cloud/ view/ 1513 for more on this.
Two recent edited collections ([1] Beetham and Sharpe and [2] Goodyear and
Retalis) provide a good starting point on learning design and between them have
contributions from most of the current major players in this area. Beetham and
Sharpe (2007) is probably the most accessible of the collected texts as it provides a
practitioner-focused collection. ‘Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age’ provides a
critical discussion of the issues surrounding the design, sharing and reuse of learning
activities. It offers tools that practitioners can apply to their own concerns and
incorporates a variety of contexts including face-to-face, self-directed, blended and
distance learning modes, as well as a range of theories of learning and roles of
technology.
References
Beetham, H. and Sharpe, R. (eds) (2007) ‘Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age’,
Oxford, RoutledgeFalmer.
Agostinho, S. (2006) ‘The use of a visual learning design representation to document
and communicate teaching ideas’ [online], Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Ascilite
Conference: Who’s Learning? Whose Technology?, Sydney 2006,
http://www.ascilite.org.au/ conferences/ sydney06/ proceeding/ pdf_papers/
p173.pdf
Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. (eds) (2008) ‘Handbook of
Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and
Technologies’, Hersey, PA, IGI Global.

9. Goodyear, P. and Retalis, S. (eds) (2010) ‘Technology-enhanced Learning: Design
Patterns and Pattern Languages’, Rotterdam, Sense Publishers B.V.
Optional Further Reading
Conole, G. (2008) ‘Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning
design’ in Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. (eds) Handbook of
Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and
Technologies, pp.187–207, Hersey, PA, IGI Global.
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, vol.45, no.3, pp.177–94.
Conole, G. and Culver, J. (2010) ‘The design of Cloudworks: applying social
networking practice to foster the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and
designs’, Computers and Education, vol.54, no.3, pp.679–92; available online at
http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?
url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.013 (accessed 19 February 2010).
Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. and Seale, J. (2004) ‘Mapping pedagogy and tools for
effective learning design’, Computers and Education, vol. 43, nos.1–2, pp.17–33; also
available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ science/
journal/ 03601315 (accessed 28 November 2008).
Open University Learning Design Initiative: see http://ouldi.open.ac.uk and blog
entries by Gráinne Conole (OULDI project lead) at http://e4innovation.com/
Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. (eds) (2009) ‘The Handbook of
Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications, and
Technologies’, New York, NY, Hershey. This includes ‘Representing models of
practice’ by Isobel Falconer and Allison Littlejohn and ‘The role of mediating
artefacts in Learning Design’ by Gráinne Conole.
Conole, G. (2008) ‘New schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies’ [online],
Ariadne Magazine; http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/ (accessed 12 January
2009).
Jeffery, A. and Currier, S. (2003) ‘What is IMS Learning Design?’ – a four-page
briefing written for CETIS/JISC; http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/lib/media/WhatIsLD_web.pdf
(accessed 12 January 2009).
IMS (2005) ‘IMS Global Learning Consortium: Learning Design Specification’ [online],
http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/ (accessed 12 January 2009).