Learning Designer

Since I am a partner in two projects planning to design short online courses I was interested to try out a new tool last week, the Learning Designer.  This was introduced through a short sharp MOOC, the International Learning Design Challenge, which was over in a week! The Learning Design tool makes the planning of online tasks less abstract and also allows you to tweak the final result if it doesn’t achieve the right balance. One of the premises of the LD is that there are 6 different types of learning activity:

• Read/watch/listen (Acq)
• Collaborative (Col)
• Discuss (Dis)
• Investigate (Inv)
• Practice (Pra)
• Produce (Pro

As you build up the lesson with various tasks, you identify which type of learning each task is and how much time will be allocated to each sub-task. The tool then gives you a visual representation of what that lesson may feel like to the learner in terms of the balance of activities in the form of a circle as you can see on the left.

There is no right or wrong pattern but the graphic could certainly lead to discussions about whether the balance is appropriate. As my trial lesson I chose a situation from the M-HOUSE project where we will be targeting people experienced in running a household and aiming to raise their awareness of how their household skills have direct parallels with running their own business.  In the case of the M-HOUSE project we think that our learners will prefer practical activities and therefore the relative smallness of the blue acquisition segment which represents input through text, audio or video, is probably a good fit. In a more academic setting this may be inappropriate.

One other feature of this specific circle to note is the absence of collaborative activities. We have experienced difficulties in facilitating collaborative work in similar projects in the past and if this were to be the first unit in our course then we may want to avoid the challenge of collaborative activities so soon. Again, in another context this may be inappropriate.

The project is in the process of identifying about 10 Key learning Situations (KLS) on which to base our course. Each KLS demonstrates certain business skills and we will use these household situations and extend them into the business sphere to raise awareness. The example I took was that of receiving a guest for a day. This involves planning, coordination, finding out consumer wants and needs (eg allergies which determine which food can be offered).

Unfortunately, my trial lesson was not chosen for review so I have not had any feedback… yet.

The tool worked reasonably well and has been extended by a course design tool which takes into account additional features such as costs.

I sometimes worry that course and lesson design can become too mechanical and automated but my first experience with the Learning Designer has been a positive one mainly due to its visual presentation and the ease with which the various components can be tweaked.

References

The learning type definitions are drawn from Chapters 6-11, Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York and London: Routledge.