My graduate certificate is slowly making its way through the various committee it needs to in order to be approved. There are, of course, always comments and suggestions about how the subjects and even the course as a whole might best be improved or altered. I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere that there are some concerns regarding the purpose and role of this particular grad cert – arguments that I’ve no interest in being a part of – but the general tenor of the feedback has been both positive and constructive. In particular, at a recent meeting, there were questions about the specific kind of discipline pedagogical knowledge that I would be engaging with, and also with my epistemological standpoint. I feel I was able to answer both of these questions reasonably well, but it certainly helped to have reflected upon these ideas through my reading and writing for some length beforehand.
The question about discipline pedagogical knowledge is particularly important, as I think that it speaks to the notion of what is learning design – and perhaps how learning design might be different in some ways to instructional design. In this case, the question was related to how i would cover all the kinds of content required for people to be learning designers working in very different fields; in other words, how would I make sure that a graduate learning designer, could go and employ their skills in a language learning context, as well as in a corporate training context, or in any other kind of context. This is a question that has, at its heart, considerations about the role of subject matter experts, as well as practitioners and educators, and I think that the TPACK framework is particularly helpful for understanding the approaches. Ideally, a learning designer would be an expert in the subject in which they are developing materials, as well as an expert in pedagogy and technology – but of course, that’s so rarely the case. Instead, there is often a kind of distributed TPACK framework going on – where a learning designer might be required to draw on a subject matter’s expertise, but also the expertise of a teacher/ instructor in order to develop learning materials. THere’s a fair amount of overlap here, too – the learning designer needs to bring their own, perhaps more general, pedagogical knowledge too, as well as their ideas about learning design. This is partly why so many Learning Design courses place such a great emphasis on high level communication skills.
And, in some respects, I think that the need to explain to a learning designer that ‘I teach this way because…’ can help to formable a much clearer theory of learning and instruction – rather than, ‘It’s always been done that way.’
The other question spoke to my epistemological standpoint. I made the point that this is, as I see it, one of the key differences between learning design and older forms of instructional design. Of course I acknowledge that more recent versions of instructional design do acknowledge socio-cultural perspectives on learning, but that is a relatively new phenomenon, and I think the key difference is that Learning Design, as a field, recognises that context is very important; i.e. there is no one size fits all approach. For this reason, the THINK subject deliberately covers a number of different theories about how we learn, and the DESIGN subject explores different theories of learning or instructional design.