As a field, learning design is constantly developing. In my practice, I have noticed three key themes that are influencing the wider context in learning design, and, indeed, higher education as a whole. They are the balance between theory and practice, the shift to online and blended learning, and the need to be close to industry.
Balancing Theory and Practice
One of the challenges in designing for learning is ensuring that there is a sufficient balance between theory and practice. This has been a site of much contention in instructional design courses in North America (see Ertmer et al, 2008; Rowland, 1992), where a criticism has often been that learning designers finish their courses without the practical skills they need to do their job. While this might seem to argue for a more vocational approach to the teaching of learning design, this, too, is unsatisfactory, because the field – and especially the tools with it – change rapidly, so it is important for novice learning designers to have an understanding of the theory that informs their work.
In designing the course, I used the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) for guidance. This is legislation from the Australian Government that stipulates what must take place in a course for it to be credentialled. For a Graduate Certificate (Level 8), graduates are required to ‘have advanced theoretical and technical knowledge in one or more disciplines or areas of practice.’ This includes the need to analyse critically, generate solutions and transmit knowledge, ideas and skills to others.
Blended and Online-Only Approaches to Learning
Another challenge related to the move towards blended and online-only forms of learning. This was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Such an idea in many higher education institutions, and at UTS it is governed by the UTS Model of Learning, which has three key themes: education should be practice-oriented, it should focus on a global workplace, and it should be research-inspired and integrated. Blended learning fits into this as a way to meet these goals.
Industry-Ready Learning Designers
The final key theme is somewhat related to the first and second: how best to ensure that learning designers are ‘industry-ready’. This was the idea that learning designers needed to be job-ready by the time they left the Graduate Certificate.
This influenced the design of the Graduate Certificate through the notion of ‘experience over expertise’ (Heggart & Dickson-Deane, in review) This was design shorthand for the need to ensure that we balanced theoretical and technical knowledge with the practical application of that knowledge in an appropriate setting. This was done through developing the Graduate Certificate so that it delivered instruction in both a synchronous and asynchronous mode. In addition, the assessment tasks across the whole course followed a similar structure: students created a learning design object to meet the needs of a design brief and then they reflected and evaluated their own success in meeting that brief, as well as considering their own learning. Both of these tasks then contributed to a student-managed portfolio of learning design projects, which could be shown to potential employers- thus ensuring that we were close to industry practice in the course.
References
Australian Qualifications Framework. (2013). About the Australian Qualifications Framework. Australian Qualifications Framework.
Ertmer, P.A., Stepich, D.A., York, C.S., Stickman, A., Wu, X., Zurek, S., & Goktas, Y. (2008). How instructional design experts use knowledge and experience to solve illstructured problems. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 21(1), 17-42.
Heggart, K., and Dickson-Deane, C. (in review). What does a learning designer course need to do? Journal of Computing in Higher Education.
Rowland, G. (1992). What Do Instructional Designers Actually Do? An Initial Investigation of Expert Practice, Performance Improvement Quarterly 5(2), 65-86.