design for learning

Joint Information Systems Committee 06/05/09 | | Slide 1

Design for Learning: making educational sense in digital contexts

Helen Beetham

Joint Information Systems Committee

Design for Learning (2004-08)

Explored the convergence of technical developments such as LAMS and IMS LD with an increasingly design-led approach to learning and teaching practice

Over a dozen projects, involving LAMS, Moodle, ReCourse and the two UK pedagogic planners

Premises:

– pedagogic intention can be articulated

– articulations can usefully be shared with other people and systems involved in the learning process

– intentions can be enacted/instantiated in real learning opportunities through learning activity design


Lessons learned from D4L phase 1 (2004-06)

Existing design practice is very varied, depending on subject and institutional culture, personal style etc (non-linear, emergent, responsive)

Educational design tools are rarely experienced by practitioners as pedagogically neutral or flexible

Design tools must enable collaborative design, contingent/responsive design, and effective sharing of design processes and outcomes

Design processes need to be integrated with other institutional processes if design practice is to be transformed

Practitioners want rich expressions of curricular purpose AND bite-sized curriculum elements that can easily be re-purposed and re-used


Models of learning and teaching

All approaches emphasise learning activity and:– Constructive alignment of curriculum elements e.g. activities with

outcomes and assessment tasks– The importance of feedback (intrinsic or extrinsic) on action– Integration across activities, e.g.

• Associatively (building component skills & knowledge into extended performance)

• Constructively (integrating skills & knowledge, planning, reflecting)• Situatively (developing identities & roles)

They differ in:– The role and importance of other people in mediating activity– The authenticity of the activity (situated/abstracted)– The balance of scaffolding (routines, structures, protocols) with

flexibility (exploration, responsive support)– The locus of control (learner, peer, tutor, other)


Lessons learned from D4L phase 2 (2006-08)

Tensions exposed around:

– Different levels of design

– Design for learning/design for teaching

– Representational forms

– Structure/flexibility of designs

– Aggregation/orchestration approaches and tools

– The role of face to face interaction in learning and learning design...


Pedagogic intentions need to be represented differently to/by different actors in the

learning 'system'

The representational dilemma


There is a tension between articulating designs clearly in educational terms, and working

powerfully with designs in educational systems




Practitioners discussing how to teach a particular topic: natural language, often used in specialist and expert ways

Learners discussing what they want out of a course: natural language, highly personal agendas

Systematic representations of learning activity: graphical interfaces, mapping and modelling, workflows and storyboards, an underpinning of technical standards.

Representations that can be used for modelling in learning systems: computational expressions

– 'pragmatic' features of design easier to represent computationally than 'educational' features

– which may be lost in the process



Modelling of educational intention remains elusive Mod4L project concluded that there is no obvious typology

of decontextualised design or patterns, in which a finite number of educationally meaningful intentions can be described.

It may be more productive to try modelling relationships between design elements, but...

… need to distinguish pragmatic and educational relationships - e.g. IMS LD (a pragmatic language of system interoperability) may not be useful for modelling educational aspects of the decision-making process.


The learning/teaching dilemma

Good teaching (conception and enactment of a pedagogic intention) is not the same as good self-directed learning (conception and enactment of a

personal learning goal) Different but dialogically related human activities

‘Teaching-supportive’ and 'learning-supportive' tools/services fulfil different needs

Learners’ and teachers’ skills are different but need to develop in dialogue

What are the points of intersection, both in terms of activity and in terms of the supporting tools/services?


The describing/prescribing dilemma

There is a tension between modelling ‘good’ design practice and offering tools for educators to

express their own pedagogic intentions

Modelling concepts allows strong forms of guidance in the design process (the system support 'good' design but must define it)

Open-ended tools are often more acceptable to practitioners but sacrifice interoperability and consensus about ‘good’ design.

How can visualisation/articulation tools carry design messages while remaining relatively neutral and open-ended?


The contingency dilemma

Pedagogic intention can accommodate contingency in a variety of ways, offering different compromises

between structure and flexibility

But there are trade-offs – logistically and educationallyTotal contingency/responsiveness → diminishing returns on

educational designEducationally meaningful guidance makes sense only in

situations which are to some extent pre-determined


The web 2.0/'power to the user' dilemma

web 2.0 technologies allow users to determine the purposes, values and meanings of knowledge:

applied to learning there are fundamental challenges for 'design' and for educational practice

as a whole.


Orchestration vs aggregation

Orchestrating technologies Institutional VLEs, CMS/LMS and portals, giving coherent access to learning resourcesLarge-scale educational intentionsCourse or module as base unitFocus on purposes of the designer/curriculumTop-down managementSelf-regulated system

Aggregating technologiesFeeds, aggregators, drawing on web services RLOs, widgets and appletsSmall-scale learning outcomesObject or activity as base unitFocus on immediate needs of user/learnerModularity, reusability and interoperabilitySelf-organising system


Web 2.0 knowledge practices refuse any final order or finished

curriculum. They pass on a fragment of sense (e.g. a tag) to future users, leaving them with

the task of making new sense in a new context.


Conclusions

'Design' is a contested space

There is a continued need for well-designed tools to support the teaching process, closely aligned with tools for learning

Contingency and collaboration remain key features of the learning/teaching process: designs and design tools must afford opportunities for both

There is probably no one tool that can resolve all the conflicting requirements but...

… teaching- and learning-centred tools and services can inter-operate...

… remembering that our aim as educators is to put learners progressively more in control of their own learning

design for learning

Documents