8.1 Learning design and open source teaching

Learning design: the missing component of e-learning

The field of Learning Design seeks to describe the “process” of education - the sequences of activities facilitated by an educator that are often at the heart of small group teaching. Consider this example:

An educator decides to break their seminar/tutorial class into small groups to debate an idea. Then each group reports back to the whole class. Then the whole class debates the different group ideas. Then the educator presents an article from the literature with a new perspective. Finally, the whole class discusses how their initial debate compares to the ideas of the article.

This example is typical of small group teaching around the world, and yet this dimension of education is notably missing from most of the e-learning technology field to date.

Learning Design seeks to describe educational processes like the example above. In particular, it has a special focus on processes that involve group tasks, not merely individual students interacting with content on a screen - rather, students interact with each other over a series of structured tasks.

Much of the work on Learning Design focuses on technology to automatically “run” the sequence of student activities (facilitated by the educator via computers), but an activity in a Learning Design could be conducted without technology. Hence, a particular Learning Design may be a mixture of online and face-to-face tasks (”blended learning”) or it could be conducted entirely face-to-face with no computers (in this case, the particular Learning Design acts as a standardised written description of the educational process - like a K-12 lesson plan). One way to think of a Learning Design system is as a workflow engine for collaborative activities. A particular Learning Design is like an educational recipe for a teacher - it describes ingredients (content) and instructions (process).

Educators can share Learning Designs in the same way they can share content; but with the added benefit is that they are now sharing the teaching process, not just teaching content. The two main Learning Design initiatives globally ( Coppercore and related projects; and LAMS) are both are freely available as open source software, and both have online communities sharing Learning Designs as open content (Learning Networks for Learning Design at OUNL - and the LAMS Community .