(Text previously published in the original grant proposal.)
The expansion, restructuring and refinancing of the Higher Education sector in recent years has meant that classes are not only larger but quite diversified in terms of student ability, motivation and cultural background (Biggs, 2003). This change has created an atmosphere where some lecturers are rethinking their teaching approaches and are seeking out what is known about facilitating effective learning. This is the challenge this project addressed by creating and refining a range of learning designs to allow for easy adoption and adaptation by other educators.
Expert teaching at university level requires mastering a variety of teaching techniques and being able to encourage most students to use the higher cognitive level processes that the higher ability students use spontaneously. Therefore, to be effective, academic staff needs to draw upon different strategies, approaches and theories - not just traditional ones. Hence, our scaffolded learning designs needed to be able to accommodate a variety of approaches to learning, different modes of delivery and a range of key principles of effective teaching in higher education and adult learning. Additionally, academic staff reports that their academic disciplines exerted the strongest influence on their course planning (Stark, 2000). This suggested that any learning activity planning tool may need to provide subject-specific advice, and so a generic solution (one size fits all) that cannot be easily modified, was unlikely to be universally successful. Hence we developed a number of discipline-specific learning designs.
Although academics have always been teachers, a number of researchers point out that it is not always regarded as their core business (Laurillard, 2002; Gibbs, 1996; Knight, 2004; Ramsden, 2003). Biggs’ research (2003) demonstrated the first priority for many was to keep up with developments in their content discipline and to contribute to them through research. He observed that developing teaching expertise takes second place in the university environment: a set of priorities dictated as much by institutional structures and reward systems as by individual choice. Therefore a tool that provides an improved teaching and learning result without requiring the academics to fully immerse themselves in another area of study (ie. education) may be very useful in this environment.
Making student learning a high priority at a time of increasing student diversity places much more responsibility on the academics. It also implies that the academic staff must know something about student learning, and what makes it possible (Laurillard, 2002). In 2003 Gibbs reported that most academic staff were less sophisticated as teachers than as researchers and even the best teachers were often gifted amateurs rather than rigorous professionals with any knowledge of the literature. Without any co-ordinated tool designed to address this issue, quality teaching at the higher education level can still be inconsistent.
Toohey (2002) proposes that exploring new models of learning design is the only realistic way to handle these pressures and maintain current standards. There is an opportunity to bring together the need to rethink higher education provision with what is known about encouraging effective learning so as to produce learning designs which offer greater possibilities than some of the current solutions.
We have demonstrated that scaffolded learning designs can serve as pedagogical frameworks to support academic staff in creating new learning experiences, with the lecturer adapting the learning design, specifying the particular activities and choosing or creating the resources and supports needed to suit his/her students (Bennett et al, 2004).
Theoretical perspective – Using a learning design lens
For a more detailed description of this approach, refer to Cameron, L. (2009). “How learning design can illuminate teaching practice”, Proceedings of the Future of Learning Design Conference. (http://ro.uow.edu.au/fld/09/Program/3/)
Learning design encourages the analysis of the process of designing learning activities by providing a framework for academics. This enables them to reflect in a deeper and more creative way about how they design and structure activities for different students or groups of students. Designs that prove to be effective may then be communicated and shared between teaching staff or retained for re-use on future occasions (Britain, 2004).
The field of learning design holds the promise of providing teachers with a framework that will enable them to design high quality, effective and innovative learning experiences for their students. By creating the possibility of deconstructing their existing teaching strategies; aiding reflection on their own practice; documenting and scaffolding innovative learning activities; and sharing and reusing expert practice, learning design has the potential to improve the quality of teaching throughout the higher education sector.
A key challenge for the future of learning design is to continue to bridge the gap between rich, descriptive models and technologies (such as IMS-LD), and the everyday practice and understanding of teachers. Highlighted here are the distinctions between the central concepts, such as the differences between a formal learning design framework, the active teacher process of creating a learning design, and the requirements for creating, transmitting and adopting effective learning designs with an aim to improve student learning.
Teaching has often involved some element of lesson design, however, with e-learning, the need for intentional design becomes more obvious and pressing. With the use of technology, learning activities require forethought and an explicit representation of what learners and teachers will do (Beetham, 2007). New technologies make aspects of teaching visible that were previously taken for granted (Beetham, 2007).
What is learning design?
Learning design has a predominant focus on technology but it can cover a more general field than just technology (Dalziel, 2008). It is a term that bridges both theory and practice and encompasses both a systematic approach with rules based on evidence and a set of contextualised practices that are constantly adapting to circumstances (Beetham & Sharpe, 2007). Because the term ‘learning design’ has come to have a variety of meanings, it will be useful here to carefully define each, consistent with recent convention (Dalziel, 2005; Britain, 2004):
Learning Design (capital “L” and “D”) as is implemented in the IMS-LD specification
Designing for learning as a broad general concept (the process)
Learning designs as a product of designing learning.
Learning Design (capital “L” and “D”) as is implemented in the IMS-LD specification
Without consistent and compatible ways to describe teaching strategies, designers will experience unnecessary difficulty in:
Documenting teaching strategies and materials
Establishing and adhering to prescribed procedures for assuring the consistency of that documentation
Re-using elements of existing teaching materials (IMS GLC, 2006)
Guaranteeing portability between learning platforms.
A learning design, modelled using the language described in the IMS-LD Specification, captures who does what, when and using which materials and services in order to achieve particular learning objectives. The Specification describes the constructs of the language and gives a binding in XML. The XML document instance is “loaded into” an IMS-LD-aware application and “played”.
The IMS-LD specification has been designed to facilitate the creation and use of learning content and support material in such a way that it can be exchanged and reused by others (Koper, 2006). An important part of this definition is that pedagogy can be conceptually abstracted from context and content, so that exemplar pedagogical models can be shared and reused (Koper & Olivier, 2005).
However, despite significant activity and enthusiasm toward developing this specification for describing learning designs, researchers have yet to find ways to describe learning designs so that teachers in mainstream education can easily understand and apply them. IMS-LD is a complex specification and the Best Practice Implementation Guide produced by IMS to assist educators in understanding how to use it is a difficult document for the average teacher to read and understand (Britain, 2004). The current representations of IMS-LD are generally not meaningful to mainstream practitioners and few examples have been generated (Neumann & Oberhuemer, 2009; Oliver & Littlejohn, 2006).
Numerous tools have been developed so that teachers might document their teaching. Falconer & Littlejohn (2009) have divided these into two categories: the executable design, that can be processed automatically by a machine; and the inspirational design, that clearly illustrates the pedagogical ideas of the designer, but are not machine readable. However, none of these tools have successfully realised the model Koper envisioned for the IMS-LD Specification.
Designing for learning as a broad general concept (the process)
Koper uses the phrase ‘learning design’ (without capitals) when referring to the process of designing units of learning, learning activities or learning environments (Koper & Tattersall, 2005, p. x). Yet it is crucial that any definition of ‘learning design’ includes a means of describing learning activities (Conole, 2009) so that they can be shared and reused. Therefore, a more comprehensive definition is, “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” (Agostinho, 2006). This is a commonly agreed meaning (Conole, 2009; Masterman, 2009; Miao, Yongwu, van der Klink, Boon, Sloep & Koper, 2009; and Britain, 2004) and one that will be adopted throughout this paper. However, Goodyear & Yang (2009) dislike the term ‘learning design’ because they feel it subtly suggests that designers are helping learners abdicate their responsibility for learning so they prefer the term ‘educational design’. Goodyear (2005) also emphasises the iterative and cyclical nature of the design process. His point is an important caution to the use of learning design to ensure it does not undervalue the role of an active learner.
The term ‘design for learning’ coined by Beetham & Sharpe (2007) overlaps in meaning with ‘learning design’ in that it focuses on activity-centred learning, activity sequences and shareability. ‘Design for learning’ focuses primarily on the activities undertaken by learners, only secondarily on the tools or materials that support them (Beetham, 2007). Therefore, in terms of process, ‘design for learning’ restricts itself to “the process by which teachers – and others involved in the support of learning – arrive at a plan or structure or design for a learning situation” (Beetham & Sharpe, 2007, p. 11).
Learning designs as a product of designing learning
Koper (Koper & Tattersall, 2005) uses the phrase ‘the learning design’ when describing the result of the learning design activity conducted by teachers. The documentation of learning designs has been implemented by classroom teachers for many years. Commonly known as “lesson plans”, they are regularly produced by teachers, often as a requirement of the formal accreditation documentation process. JISC (2006, p. 1) define a learning design as, “an outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme”.
We adopted a more comprehensive definition provided by Donald (p. 4, 2009):
A learning design documents and describes a learning activity in such a way that other teachers can understand it and use it in their own context. Typically it includes descriptions of learning tasks, resources and supports.
A learning design may be of any degree of granularity, ranging from a course to an individual activity. The scope of the design is determined by the learning objectives to be met (Falconer, Beetham, Oliver, Lockyer & Littlejohn, 2007). If a learning design is shared with another teacher, and it can call upon that other teacher’s existing knowledge of context, or experience, then the activities need only be described briefly. But if the pedagogy or context is unfamiliar to that teacher, then the new scenario will need be described in great detail. This is a factor that limits the potential usefulness of learning designs for changing practice (Falconer et al, 2007).
A learning design can communicate more than just the sequence of activities; it can also express the relationship between the activities. This relationship reflects the pedagogic intent of the design and communicates why these particular activities are to be delivered in this way (Falconer & Littlejohn, 2009).
The design process
There are many different descriptions of learning design processes. Laurillard (2006) stated simply that the design process is “determining what it takes to learn and how the learning process needs to be supported if we are to be sure the learner can learn.” Beetham and Sharpe (2007, p. 6) provide a broad overview of the design process:
Investigation: who are my users and what do they need? What principles and theories are relevant?
Application: How should these principles be applied in this case?
Representation or modelling: What solution will best meet users’ needs? How can this be communicated to developers and/or directly to users?
Iteration: How does the design stand up to the demands of development? How useful is it in practice? What changes are needed?
Britain’s “Key Activities in Learning Design” (2004, p. 7) provides a more prescriptive list:
Define learning objectives
Develop narrative description of learning and teaching scenario
Create learning activity workflow from narrative description
Assign resources, tools and people to activities
Running (real-time)
Learner support and on-the-fly adaptation
Reflecting (including sharing outputs for peer reflection)
Using learning design to illuminate teaching practice
Learning design is a descriptive framework that allows teachers to unpack the learning design process by separating the content from the pedagogy. As seen from the comments below, it encourages teachers to reflect in a deeper and more creative way and see how they design and structure activities for learners (Britain, 2004).
“it made me look at the content from a learner’s perspective, so that I could ensure that the elements would be engaging and easy to understand, as well as accomplishing the learning that I want the learner to achieve”
(teacher comment in Masterman, 2009, p. 233)
“thought about the place of the teacher and the role of the teacher”
(teacher comment in Masterman, 2009, p. 233)
“I’ve never really thought about all of this”
(teacher comment in Bennett et al., 2008, p. 36,315)
This approach makes the relationship between practice and the underpinning theory more explicit, and, as Conole argues (Conole & Fill, 2005), this should enable teachers to make more theoretically informed choices of tools and resources used to support learning.
The focus of the framework is not the discipline content but the activities employed by the teacher to help students understand that content, acknowledging that students learn better when they are actively engaged. Learning design can describe many different pedagogies rather than prescribe any one specific teaching or learning strategy (Koper, 2001 Dalziel, 2009).
Once teachers realise they can separate content from the learning design, they can be introduced to the concept of a generic learning design. It is proposed that generic learning designs could serve as a pedagogical framework to support teachers in creating learning experiences, with the teacher adapting the learning design, specifying the particular activities and choosing or creating the resources and supports needed to suit his/her learners (Bennett et al., 2004, p. 177).
Also called “practice models” they are common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc.) (Falconer & Littlejohn, 2007). Practice models should be a representation of effective practice and are intended to inspire teachers to adopt effective pedagogical approaches, and support them in doing so, by promoting sharing and reuse of effective designs. They have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning editing and running the designs (Falconer et al, 2007). The use of the term ‘model’ or ‘exemplar’ is intended to indicate a further level of abstraction from the learning activity or sequence that was originally designed (JISC, 2006). However, many of the things that teachers most want to know about when assessing designs for reuse, such as rationale, assessment policies, reflection and evaluation, and student outputs and feedback, are scarcely covered, if at all, in most existing representation forms (Falconer et al, 2007).
When looking at a design to inspire and hence change practice, teachers need to get some insight into how they and their students would operate effectively within the confines of the design. The situations in which teachers are most likely to be effective are those which require flexibility. That is, where the problems are ill defined and/or where rapid decisions need to be made (Falconer et al, 2007).
There is little incentive for a teacher experienced in one teaching method to change to a new practice in which they will be a novice with little indication of how they might ever become anything else. When teachers are in the position of learners as they change their practice, the formation of a community and dialogue around a practice is essential to helping to internalise the practice so that it can be performed competently (Falconer et al, 2007). The learning design framework can provide a means to have this dialogue.
However effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse. To adapt, share and/or reuse learning designs, they will need to be documented. An aim of learning design is to find a shared language for describing educational activity structures that can be easily used by typical teachers (Dalziel, 2009).
A key aim of the IMS-LD specification is to make reuse possible, and yet it has not been a simple matter for software systems to represent learning designs in a way that is both powerful and flexible and also easy to understand and manipulate. The design needs to be described at a sufficient level of abstraction that it can be generalised beyond the single teaching and learning context for which it was created, but not at such an abstract level that the pedagogical value and richness is lost (Britain, 2007). And as Masterman & Vogel (2007) point out, few teachers are prepared to invest time and effort to create learning designs that are reusable (Britain, 2007).
The field of learning design holds the promise of providing teachers with a framework that will enable them to design high quality, effective and innovative learning experiences for their students. By creating the possibility of deconstructing their existing teaching strategies; aiding the reflection of their own practice; documenting and scaffolding innovative learning activities; and sharing and reusing expert practice, learning design has the potential to improve the quality of teaching throughout the higher education sector.
A key challenge for the future of Learning Design is to continue to bridge the gap between rich, descriptive models and technologies (such as IMS-LD), and the everyday practice and understanding of teachers. This section has drawn attention to subtle distinctions between central concepts, such as the differences between a formal learning design framework, the active teacher process of creating a learning design, and the requirements for creating, transmitting and adopting effective learning designs so as to improve student learning. Deeper analysis of the links between these concepts in the future should provide further foundations for the adoption of learning design by typical educators.
The way forward – Structured guidance
(Text previously published in the original grant proposal.)
Ramsden (2003) found that academic staff looks for support with their teaching for a number of reasons. They may be concerned about their students’ performance, they may want some reassurance about their teaching techniques, or they might want to try an innovation. Some academic staff do not know how to start improving their teaching, are often overwhelmed by the field’s complexity, and they ask for a simple solution that will quickly solve all their difficulties.
Depending on the infrastructure provided by their institution, help may be on hand in the form of professional development staff but as each university tries to do more with less, often the availability of help is limited, if it can be offered at all. Stark’s research (2000) found that most university academic staff do not avail themselves of expert assistance when planning courses even if it is readily available and rarely read educational literature. They relied on their own ad hoc observations because they did not find the information available to them about learning and teaching meaningful. As a result, these academics were attempting the complex and challenging task of effective teaching with no training nor were they intending to make any formal attempt to develop their teaching skills in the short term. This is not an isolated incident and similar findings have been reported elsewhere (Knight, 2004). This project arose out of this need for alternative methods of support for these academic staff.
Sharing learning designs, resources and methods used by others have been trialled successfully at a number of universities. Members of our Project Team have worked with two examples of this approach. The Learning Design Template Project at Queensland University of Technology (Heathcote, 2006) provided academic staff with templates that embedded pedagogical principals, eg. problem-based learning, critical thinking. The Online Course Templates Project from the University of New South Wales (McAlpine & Allen, 2007) produced templates based on specific learning designs that were developed to support courses. Both these projects were successfully piloted.
Additionally, academic staff may also have access to external example designs such as those provided on the “Learning Designs” website at the University of Wollongong (Oliver, Harper, Hedberg, Wills & Agostinho, 2002), the LAMS Community (www.lamscommunity.org) or the Technology-Supported Learning Database developed by Ron Oliver at ECU (http://aragorn.scca.ecu.edu.au/tsldb/). However, Goodyear (2005) notes that the resources available to university academic staff for learning design are not of a consistent quality, are difficult to locate in relation to a particular pedagogical framework, and are not constructed in such a way that they capture and distil the practical implications of research-based knowledge and nor do they accommodate the iterative nature of design practice. This project addressed these gaps by widening the audience for existing learning designs beyond the original, specific institutions and disciplines by creating and implementing templates and advice in a simple to use and flexible learning activity planning tool that guides
teaching staff through the learning design process.