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Learning design
- 3. • Design is an inherent part of any teacher’s practice • It is so embedded in a teacher’s practice that it tends to be implicit • Learning Design raises multiple questions within an individual e.g. • How do teachers prepare their teaching materials • 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 questions and answers to them constitute just some of the questions that are answered in the learning design process.
- 4. There is a wide variety of resources available and ways in which they can be used to support teaching and learning. This therefore means there is an increasing need to better understand the design process, and clearer ways to create learning activities. Teachers and designers make choices on which tech’s to use depending on the activities they are designing for.
- 5. • Involves you utilizing different ways of thinking about design. • Helps teachers map pedagogy, technologies and activities. • Looks at how design ideas can be represented and shared. • The advantages and disadvantages of each form of representation. • Which tools would better represent the idea. teachers have had to make that process more explicit. the possibility of learning design existing as unarticulated shared expertise 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 Learning design seeks to provide tools and support that can help those involved in teaching and learning respond to changes
- 6. Why is learning design and paying attention to it so important. • It is the core of the teaching process • Ultimate learning experience students have results from teaching session, learning material and session design. • The impact of good design makes itself felt immediately • Expect teachers can illustrate complex concepts easily. • Setting up assessments, arguments, and presentations also becomes easier. Learning design aims to move the pedagogic skills of the expert teacher from tacit to explicit knowledge.
- 7. Learning activities are those tasks that students undertake to achieve a set of intended outcomes Examples include Contributing to a ‘for and against debate’ in a discussion forum Manipulating data in a spreadsheet Constructing a group report in a wiki • 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
- 8. Learning design provides a means of guiding the creation of learning activities, representing them so they can be shared. 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 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 and Promote creativity amongst other things 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
- 9. ‘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 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
- 10. • 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. • the possibility of learning design existing as unarticulated shared expertise • 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 Learning design seeks to provide tools and support that can help those involved in teaching and learning respond to changes
- 11. • Several tools have been developed to help the designer/practitioner • The JISC Design for Learning Programme supported a variety of projects that developed tools • An Exam of some design tools include Cloudworks, RELOAD, LAMS, SEKAI, Lodon Pedagogy Planner etc
- 12. • 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 • 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? • 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 • Learning design will be organised and embedded within established cultural and social practices and so practitioners will encounter it from many standpoints
- 13. • learning design refers to the range of activities associated with creating a learning activity • crucially provides a means of describing learning activities • Aims to help teachers create better learning experiences • Improve pedagogical skills with regard to new technologies. share and reuse of learning activities
Editor's Notes
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 of different forms of representation. You will have the chance to explore different tools for planning designs.
- 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.
- 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 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. of intenThis can: Make the structures ded 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).
- ‘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. 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.
- 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. 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 Learning Activity Management System (LAMS): http://www.lamsfoundation.org/ RELOAD: http://www.reload.ac.uk/
- 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. 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. 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 is no singular agreement regarding representations or languages for learning design. 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.
- 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.