In my second posting about my ongoing work in Learning Design, I thought that I might share some of my reflections on the readings that I’ve completed thus far. In some ways, it’s been affirming to read people describe learning design in ways that I feel comfortable with; certainly, there is little there that I am unfamiliar with, and I feel my long experience as a teacher has stood me in good stead. Equally, the work that I’ve done over the past five years as a learning designer means that I am across a lot of the topics that are being discussed, at both a practical and a theoretical level.
I think the name ‘learning designer’ is worthy of some reflection to start with, mostly because it’s by no means the only term used to describe this kind of work. It appears that there is an older, more US-centric, term that is Instructional Designer. I’ve also heard the term Educational Designer and Curriculum Designer used too, to effectively refer to the same work. More recently, I’ve heard ‘Design for Learning’ used, rather than ‘Learning Design’. And I’ve even heard people call themselves ‘Learning Engineers’.
There is a lot to think about here – and I think names are important. For example, and as I’ll discuss in another post, there are strong links between parts of learning design and also the learning sciences. Education’s links to some forms of science has always been difficult – education is a complex phenomena that resists easy classification – but perhaps the emphasis on ‘engineer’ for example, is an attempt to focus more on the science of learning design, rather than the “art” of the same process. Having said that, I’m not sure that I like the term ‘art’ or ‘craft’ of learning design any better; rather, I would suggest that good teachers, good learning designers – whatever nomenclature they use are are assigned to – work professionally in complex and rapidly changing spaces, making best use of the tools and resources that are available to achieve the learning goals that have been set.
Ultimately, I think trying to split learning design, and indeed, education as a whole into science or art is a foolish endeavour: learning design, as I understand it, will always be some combination of both of these. I’m hardly alone in that opinion. Indeed, Brock Craft and Yishay Mor have described learning design as ‘the creative and deliberate act of devising new practices, plans of activity, resources and tools aimed at achieving particular educational aims in a given context’. They emphasise the dual nature of learning design – that is, it is both creative and deliberate (and hence it is a design, not an art). According to Mor, Ferguson and Wasson (2015), this recognition fits in with a movement away from educators as deliverers of content and instead to creators of a learning experience. It is this movement that seen educators shift from ‘safe on the stage to guide on the side (King 1993) – a move which means they are more and more ‘designers for learning’ (Goodyear and Dimitriadis 2013).
I think that Maina, Craft and More (2015) describe this shift quite well. They argue that educators will still provide access to information, but they also need to ‘carefully craft the conditions for learners to enquire, explore, analyse, synthesise and collaboratively construct their knowledge from the variety of technological resources available to them.’ This is an approach to learning that is quite modern; the internet has brought with it a promise of untold volumes of knowledge, and, while that might be true, there is still a need for someone who can guide, direct, share, explain. Often, some educators try to break this down into an argument about whether teachers need to be subject matter experts or not; surely, if all that information is out there, there’s no need for a teacher to know the causes of World War One, for example. My answer would be that, if you’re going to act as a guide, you need at least a certain level of knowledge- otherwise you will become as lost as surely as your students. And I think this is especially the case for complex parts of knowledge. While we might be able to look up where the first modern Olympics took place on Google with only minimal assistance, it’s an entirely different matter to be able to discuss the causes that led to the development of the modern Olympics. In the latter, it helps to have someone who can find a pathway onto the information superhighway – to use a slightly out of date metaphor.
This is the role of learning designers as far as I can make out. I know there are other, more detailed descriptions of the role of the learning designer (and I fully intend to describe and consider them here in later posts), but my starting point, based on my own experience as a learning designer breaks down learning design into the following framework.
Learning Designers:
- Consult. They speak with experts and assist them in developing instructional material.
- Curate. They examine available materials and resources, and select the best ones, appropriate for the learners’ context.
- Create. Should there be no appropriate material, they create their own resources.
- Commission. Should they not have the requisite skills to create their own resources, they engage experts who can.
- Coordinate. Most importantly, learning designs coordinate on a couple of different levels. They coordinate and plan the delivery of the learning design, and they facilitate the learning within any particular design – i.e. structure the learning so that it is paced appropriately for the individual learner’s context and needs.