OLDS MOOC is making me think about learning design. It’s a course in Learning Design, after all. Don’t get me wrong, I think about learning design a lot: I design materials to aid students’ learning and academic colleagues’ teaching, but I don’t often reflect on this process itself. It feels difficult and awkward to be reflexive, to be inquiring about my practice.
There was an interesting discussion on Google Groups entitled “What does learning design mean for you”, with references to some old friends (Kolb’s Learning Cycle, Stephen Downes) and some new theories. As a teacher I liked methodology (I entered TEFL at a time when there were approaches galore), but felt that a little theory went a long way: it can occasionally become a kind of self-aggrandising navel gazing or a lexical stick to beat other teachers with. I don’t think that’s happening on oldsmooc, but I think it’s a danger with this kind of course.
All of which is a long run up for the short jump of my very personal statement about learning design:
There is so much great debate and links to promising resources in this thread that I can add little, except my own personal account as someone who does learning design with teachers but doesn’t teach. A strange position, granted, but there you go.
For me, learning design is multi-faceted and malleable. Learning design is not an individual endeavour, it’s a team effort involving teachers, students, admin staff and sometimes learning technologists. No two courses, teachers or students are the same and so it’s important to have a range of options, to have a fluid mix of elements. To do this it’s important to keep learning, keep trying new things and try to keep an open mind.
For me learning design is about taking in the context of a learning situation as fully as possible: the politics, personalities, subject domains, skills, attitudes and dispositions of stakeholders to begin with. Then the educational context: how is it assessed; is assessment fixed or can we change it; how many students are there; what if we end up with a much larger cohort than anticipated, or much smaller? Do we know what tends to work well for these types of students in this subject domain – what are people in other settings doing? What kind of tasks and interactions might promote learning? What kind of learning do we value most? How will we know if learning is happening? How do we promote peer support? How can we introduce ‘authentic’ activity into the learning and assessment. Can we trial new ideas with colleagues or small groups beforehand?
It begins and ends with people.
Sometimes what seems important turns out to be impossible, sometimes beautiful things happen spontaneously.
