So this year, as I’ve previously mentioned, I’m working in a new role, with a new employer. I’ve left the Independent Education Union after five interesting and educative years, and accepted a Lecturer position at the University of Technology Sydney, where I will be responsible for developing a new Graduate Certificate of Learning Design, as well as undertaking my own research.
I’m pretty excited about the new opportunities afforded by the role, and I’m also a little bit nervous about taking on such a significant responsibility. I’ve managed subjects before, and even with the GCREDI at WSU, which I was nominally responsible for, I was working under the supervision and plan of much more experienced academics.
I’m also conscious that ‘learning design’ is a bit divorced from my own academic area of expertise. At least, I thought it was. I say ‘academic’ deliberately because, for at least the last 5 years, I’ve been doing a fair amount of work that branded me as a learning designer. I’ve also done this work in a variety of sectors. For example, at the IEU, I assisted in the development, implementation and facilitation of a range of face to face and online professional development for members. Often this required me to develop the course materials, or to interact with the subject-matter experts to assist them in this process. Sometimes I facilitated online sessions, sometimes face to face. I even organised asynchronous sessions – what we took to calling ‘on-demand’ professional development opportunities for members.
And, of course, I’ve done plenty of work in the learning design space for UTS. This originally started when I helped out on a project called the UTS Online Renovation and Week 1 Review. I helped academics design specific activities for the first week of term, making use of a variety of tools such as Google Maps and Drive. I also developed websites to sit within the online learning spaces (which was a UTS-branded version of Blackboard). Of course, this led onto other projects – I helped develop print learning materials for a research project, as well as working with the University of Central Asia to develop courses related to film, radio and print. More recently, I’ve done lots of work related to the Learner Experience transformation at UTS.
While these projects varied considerably in the tasks that I completed, there was some commonality in experience and principles. I guess, in reflecting and articulating on these, I’ve served a bit of an apprenticeship in Learning Design – even if at the time, I was convinced that what I was doing was just good teaching and learning. And I think that this is an important point. For many teachers that I speak to about my work, they say (and I agree with them, for the most part), ‘That’s just good teaching and learning. ‘ As a teacher, I have always taken the time to think carefully about the learners in my class, what they wanted to learn and what I wanted them to learn, what resources and tools I had available, and what I understood about learning. Most teachers I know do this as a matter of course. Of course, I was also mindful of government required curricula and regulations. And somewhere, in the middle of that, I designed learning experiences for them. Isn’t that what learning design is?
So how is learning design different to teaching? I’ll dive into the different definitions of learning design in a later post, but for the sake of this argument, I think the answer to that question is one of scale and scope, rather than any qualitative difference. Teachers working in schools have already had a great many decisions made for them. There is a curriculum that they are required to follow. Clear outcomes to be addressed. Decisions about the kinds of tools and eLearning platforms have already been made for them, too. Equally, very few teachers I know have any choice in who is in their class, or when those classes are, or even the kinds of furniture that’s in their class. Some teachers are able to move that furniture, or even get different furniture, but I see even those small freedoms being eroded in many schools.
(Of course, this perhaps speaks more to the deprofessionalisation of teachers than anything else – and I’m not suggesting that the devolution of such a responsibility is a good thing – far from it. I’m simply trying to make clear the difference).
On the other hand, learning designers are not limited by any such restrictions in a formal sense; of course, every organisation is going to have its own limitations and boundaries, and a learning designer needs to be mindful of them, but there are less draconian mandates in place in terms of what environments, tools and approaches can be adopted, and consequently, that means that there is more freedom for learning designers to make decisions based on what they think is in the best interests of their learners. For example, learning designers can decide on things like the curriculum for a particular course- there might (or might not) be started outcome for what students should achieve, but often a learning designer has a great deal of freedom in determining how best to reach those outcomes. A learning designer also has much more scope, in some ways, to determine what learning objects to deploy and make use of, too.
So, does this mean teachers are learning designers? Or are learning designs teachers? At this point, I would suggest that teaching is a subset of learning design. All teachers are learning designers, but not necessarily all learning designers are teachers. I’m sure, as I continue with my work in this space, my thoughts will change and develop.