Learning Design

Conceptualizing a Framework for Teaching and Learning Online

James Dalziel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138910973
• eBook ISBN: 9781317435327
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The new field of learning design has the potential to revolutionize not only technology in education, but the whole field of teaching and learning through the application of design thinking to education. Learning Design looks inside the "black box" of pedagogy to understand what teachers and learners do together, and how the best teaching ideas can be shared on a global scale. Learning design supports all pedagogical approaches, content areas, and fields of education.

The book opens with a new synthesis of the field of learning design and its place in educational theory and practice, and goes on to explore the implications of learning design for many areas of education—both practical and theoretical—in a series of chapters by Larnaca Declaration authors and other international experts.

1

The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design—2013

James Dalziel, Gráinne Conole, Sandra Wills, Simon Walker, Sue Bennett, Eva Dobozy, Leanne Cameron, Emil Badilescu-Buga and Matt Bower

Introduction

Education faces many challenges in the changing modern world. Learners are changing in their approaches to education—they use digital technologies, they multi-task, they collaborate and they are becoming less patient with teacher-centric styles of education.

Educators¹ face many changes—such as expectations of adopting innovative teaching approaches, alignment of teaching to external standards, growing requirements for professional development and difficulties in balancing a complex range of demands from different stakeholders.

Government and educational institutions also face many changes, such as the rise of the knowledge economy and the need for different kinds of graduates, a shift from knowledge scarcity to abundance, and the impact of technology—especially the Internet via open sharing of educational resources and massive open online courses (MOOCs).

In the context of these changes, effective teaching and learning in the classroom² (and beyond) remains central. How can educators become more effective in their preparation and facilitation of teaching and learning activities? How can educators be exposed to new teaching ideas that take them beyond their traditional approaches? How can technology assist educators without undermining them? How can learners be better prepared for the world that awaits them?

This chapter describes how the new field of Learning Design contributes to the central challenge of improving teaching and learning. Learning Design can assist educators to describe effective teaching ideas so that they can be shared with, and adapted by, other educators. While the field has primarily focussed on higher education and K-12 schools to date, it also has implications for vocational and professional training. This chapter describes how ongoing work to develop a descriptive language for teaching and learning activities (often including the use of technology) is changing the way educators think about planning and facilitating educational activities. The ultimate goal of Learning Design is to convey great teaching ideas among educators in order to improve student learning.

This chapter begins with this introduction, followed by an analogy from music to provide a context for Part 1, which considers the possibility of educational notation. Part 2 describes how the field of Learning Design is realizing this possibility, illustrated with an example based on a Role Play. Part 3 considers current definitional challenges in Learning Design and its provocative aspiration towards pedagogical neutrality. Part 4 provides a wider conceptual map of education for exploring the place of Learning Design, including more examples of current Learning Design approaches, and how the map can be used to analyze pedagogical theories. Part 5 returns to the relationship between Learning Design and pedagogical theories, and the central question of effective teaching and learning approaches. The conclusion offers a new synthesis of the ideas discussed in this chapter as a foundation for the future of Learning Design, and the epilogue returns to the music analogy to reflect on the future prospects of this synthesis.

While the concepts discussed in this chapter have potentially far-reaching implications for many aspects of education, this chapter is written primarily for those with an interest in Learning Design and in pedagogical theories. Future work based on this chapter will explore these ideas in different ways for other audiences, such as policy makers and typical educators.

An Analogy from Music

Throughout the history of music, some people argued it was impossible to write down music—music was too special, too ethereal to ever be reduced to written form.

However, over many years the Western musical tradition slowly developed a notational system for describing and sharing musical ideas. This standard format allowed musicians to share great musical ideas without a need for personal contact.

As a result, a musician living hundreds of years later, in a very different context, can still understand the musical ideas of a composer long ago, and, with appropriate skills, can reproduce those musical ideas.

Music notation does not capture everything about musical ideas—a significant role remains for performers to bring their own interpretations to music. But musical notation contains enough information to convey musical ideas from one person to another over time and space.

Music notation does not guarantee beautiful music—indeed, mediocre music can be written down just as precisely as beautiful music. Music notation allows for a single notational framework to describe many different styles of music. And while the Western notational framework is sufficiently broad to describe many types of music, it contains limitations that make some kinds of music (e.g. quartertone singing) difficult to describe within the standard format.

The purpose of creating musical notation was not simply the abstract concept of music representation; rather, it was a vehicle for conveying great musical ideas to others. This sharing helps other musicians to learn the crafts of performance and composition, as well as enriching countless lives who listen to music that they would never have heard if it had not been written down many years ago.

Part 1: Educational Notation?

Can we apply the lesson of music notation to education? Could we develop a way to describe the activities of educators and learners in classrooms (and online) so that great teaching ideas could be conveyed from one educator to another? Can we help to make implicit, private teaching ideas into explicit, shared ideas?

In this chapter, we focus on the particular requirements of formal education where an educator plays at least some role in structuring learning activities for learners. Self-study, and learning in groups where there is no educator or educator-like role, is outside our current scope. This should not be taken to mean that we focus only on “teacher-centric” education—far from it—but it is simply to note that our scope is the potential for educators to learn about good teaching ideas from other educators. These ideas may call for an active role for the educator³ in directing activities, or the educator’s role may be to facilitate learners as active managers of their learning.

In one sense, we have made progress already. The “content” dimension of education is captured in books, websites, recorded lectures, videos and other resources. But content transmission is not the only dimension of education—otherwise educational institutions would need only libraries, rather than libraries and classrooms.

Describing teaching and learning activities—what educators and learners actually do in classrooms and online—is less developed. In many school contexts there is a tradition of written lesson plans, and individual educators in universities and vocational training may write down activity plans for tutorials and practical workshops. But there is no generally agreed notational system for educational activities that has the expressiveness or widespread adoption of music notation.

If one stops to reflect for a moment, this is a surprising situation. Many educators could benefit from learning about their colleagues’ great teaching ideas, yet our ability to convey a great teaching idea from one educator to another is hampered by our lack of a common language for what we do in classrooms and online. We struggle to describe even something as simple as how different activities are conducted over time in a classroom (e.g. lecturing, small group debate, whole-class discussion, individual reading, practical tasks etc.) or its online equivalents.

Many very bright people have been educators, so the lack of a descriptive framework for education could be interpreted as follows: it is a very hard problem—if it wasn’t, some bright person would have solved it already.

By comparison with music notation, a descriptive framework for teaching and learning activities would not describe everything that occurs—rather, it would seek to convey enough information so that one educator could benefit from the great ideas of another educator. These educational ideas could be of many different kinds, based on different underlying pedagogical theories, in a manner similar to different styles of music.

Just as with beautiful or mediocre music, an educational notation system would not guarantee that the ideas written down would be educationally effective—rather, it is simply a way of conveying an educational idea using a common framework. And as with the problem of representing quartertone singing in Western music notation, any system of educational notation will have weaknesses in describing some types of education, even where it is strong at describing others. Given the hard nature of the problem and the immaturity of this field, it is likely that early educational notation systems will have many weaknesses and few strengths, but in the same way that music notation has improved over time, the same may occur for educational notation.

One important difference between music performances and teaching is that it is typical for musicians to faithfully reproduce the written musical idea. In education, however, there is an important role for educators to be able to adapt their teaching in response to their learners’ unique needs. This adaptation could take the form of reflecting on a great teaching idea from a colleague, then reworking the idea for a future class based on the educator’s insights into his/her learners’ needs. Another kind of adaptation is where an educator decides to change his/her approach in the middle of a class—perhaps because the original plan is not working out as expected, or interesting new ideas have arisen in class that are worth pursuing.

Interestingly, the analogy with music does not break down completely at this point. There are traditions of improvisation in music (e.g. jazz) that take into account the immediate evolving music experience (often due to the musical interactions between performers). But even improvisation often uses some predetermined basic musical structures, such as the chord progressions in the 12-bar blues.

Another point of comparison with music is whether the notation is for use by the creator of the musical experience, or for use by others. If a musician composes a piece of music for his/her own performance, he/she may not write it down using musical notation (or may only write down a brief summary, such as guitar chords), as the musician remembers the details for performance. But when the musician wishes to convey the musical idea to another musician, musical notation becomes important. As many educators “compose” their teaching ideas for their own use, the need for notation may not be pressing in these cases; and yet when educators wish to convey a great teaching idea to other educators, they lack an agreed format for communication. An agreed notation format would also assist with other facets of education, such as documentation, quality assurance and enhancement of teaching and learning activities.

There are two compelling reasons for developing a system of educational notation. First, teaching is sometimes called the loneliest profession (Hooker, 1949) as individual educators often have little exposure to each other’s teaching. In many ways, the craft of teaching is still at a relatively amateur stage, and lacks the professionalization that would come from a richer language for describing the essence of teaching and learning activities. While there are examples of team teaching and teacher observation in some contexts, much more could be done to share good teaching practice, and a common notational format could assist this sharing.

Second, modern society and business expect more of graduates than just content knowledge. Skills such as problem solving, teamwork, effective communication, creativity, intercultural understanding, critical thinking and others are required for success in the “knowledge economy”. These skills have been called graduate attributes, soft skills, generic skills or 21st-century skills. These skills are difficult to learn in the abstract—instead, they need to be learned by working with content knowledge. Given this, transforming education for the 21st century means redesigning the core teaching and learning activities used with content knowledge, rather than simply adding extra courses on these broader skills, and leaving content teaching practices untouched.

As many educators find it challenging to combine content knowledge and the development of these broader skills in day-to-day teaching and learning activities, there is a need for professional development about innovative teaching structures that address this challenge (such as Problem-Based Learning, Role Plays, WebQuests and similar teaching strategies). While this professional development has many aspects, educators could gain significant benefits from a common language for describing great teaching ideas, just as an important part of learning a musical instrument is understanding and playing great music.

While the primary focus of this chapter is the implications of educational notation for pedagogical theory and practice, such notation also has productivity implications. If educators can easily reuse and adapt their colleagues’ good ideas, then the preparation time for teaching may decrease (consider the many educators across the world re-inventing similar teaching plans each day). That is, successful sharing of good teaching ideas can lead not only to more effective teaching, but also to more efficient preparation for teaching. These productivity benefits may lead to increased cost-effectiveness in some contexts, but for many educators, the benefit is more likely to be increased “time effectiveness”—that is, time savings in one area of teaching (e.g. preparation) that allow for more time on other areas (e.g. more individual feedback to learners).

In summary, we take inspiration from the history and uses of music notation to try to imagine a descriptive framework for teaching and learning activities that is broad enough to describe many different pedagogical approaches. A framework of this kind could help to propagate great teaching ideas in order to enhance the effectiveness of educators, leading to richer learning experiences for learners. We could consider other examples of descriptive frameworks—patterns and plans in architecture, recipes, the Unified Modelling Language (UML) in software development, dance notation etc. We leave it to other experts to draw out lessons for education from other descriptive frameworks—in this chapter, we use music notation as an extended analogy for imagining education notation. In the next section, we describe work on educational notation in the field of Learning Design, followed by a new conceptual map for Learning Design and the broader education landscape.

Part 2: Learning Design

The new field of Learning Design seeks to develop a descriptive framework for teaching and learning ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design—2013
• 2 Theoretical Underpinnings of Learning Design
• 3 Reflections on Metaphors for Learning Design
• 4 Learning Design in the New Digital Age
• 5 The Complementary Nature of Learning Design and TPACK
• 6 The 7Cs of Learning Design
• 7 Investigating University Educators’ Design Thinking and the Implications for Design Support Tools
• 8 A Deeper Understanding of Reuse: Learning Designs, Activities, Resources and Their Contexts
• 9 The Use and Usefulness of Transdisciplinary Pedagogical Templates
• 10 Social Adoption of Learning Design
• 11 A Framework for Adaptive Learning Design in a Web-Conferencing Environment
• 12 Learning Design: Where Do We Go from Here?
• List of Contributors
• Index