Vision Statement: Learning Design at the OU

Vision statement: Learning Design at the OU

Introduction

In the creation of learning materials and/or services for use by students studying independently or in the guidance and facilitation by teaching staff of learning by students in the lecture hall or tutorial room, the impact of good design makes itself felt immediately. Often working intuitively or with tacit knowledge, the expert teacher can produce the apposite example to illustrate a complex concept or advise on the use of formative assessment at the appropriate point in a long chain of argumentation to anchor a critical perception in a student’s mind. Moving the pedagogic skills of the expert teacher from the realm of tacit to explicit knowledge and capturing the essence of such performance for reuse in other contexts by other staff are the objectives of the study of Learning Design.

The Elements of Learning Design

There are significant advantages in the instilling of the tenants of good design across the teaching and support staff of an educational institution, in this instance an institute of higher education (HEI):

• a clearer perception by the teacher of good examples of teaching or learning support
• more efficient use of the teacher’s time
• more efficient and effective learning on the part of students
• more useful sharing of pedagogic insights across the teaching and support staff, and across disciplines.

To aid the perception, capture and communication of such good examples (in a form that can be easily “read” and “digested”) requires the creation of a textual or graphical “space” and within it a “vocabulary” of pedagogical elements in terms of which the examples can be described. From there the rules of combination of these elements, to create a learning task, and groups of such tasks, has to be articulated. Finally a decision of principle has to determine the intended audience for the design examples captured and communicated in this way. Given that the teaching and learning support staff will be part of the audience, the question remains as to the degree to which students come directly into contact with the elements of Learning Design or work with the results of their exploitation in curriculum materials and services. In the Learning Design community there are examples that demonstrate the impact of these choices on the Learning Design tools thus created.

Learning Design at the OU

The OU Learning Design project is based on a three-part strategy to researching and developing a Learning Design approach to help teachers create more effective learning activities and to provide better guidance for students as they work through media-rich content.

• Firstly, this involves gathering empirical evidence about the design process, through interviews with teachers about how they go about design, through in-depth evaluations of courses as they are developed and through interactive workshops and focus groups. This empirical data is giving us a better understanding of the design process and it highlights that design is a messy, creative and iterative process.
• Secondly, we have developed a tool for visualising design, CompendiumLD.
• Thirdly, we have developed a collaborative social networking site, CLouDworks, where teachers can find and share designs, teacher ideas, as well as Learning Design tools and resources and different methods for thinking about the design process.

CompendiumLD

We decided to base our LD representation space on the “Compendium” application developed by the Knowledge Media Institute of the OU. Compendium is a graphical tool to record the various stages in a discussion, with icons to represent different aspects such as ‘question’, ‘idea’, or ‘decision’. The icons that represent such elements are placed in a two-dimensional graphical space and directed lines connect one element to the next in the order of their appearance in the argument. In skilful hands the essence of the discussion can be captured in real time, adding to the effectiveness of the argumentation process in reaching a satisfactory conclusion. The representation of LD uses the Compendium graphical space and an expanded icon set that includes representatives of pedagogic tasks to be undertaken by students, in an order indicated by directed lines connecting tasks. Other icons represent the resources used to implement these tasks and the roles that tutors play in supporting the student’s activity and in evaluating the results. The LD icons contain further information as to the preferred implementation of the task; clicking on, or hovering over, the icon in question display this information. Further additions to the icon set are presently being considered.

Using the graphical tools described above, complex learning activities, comprising a series of tasks selected and set into an order by the “Learning Designer”, can be represented and then analysed and reformulated to achieve greater clarity and effectiveness. Inversely, a narrative that explains such a learning activity can be analysed and represented using the graphical tools of CompendiumLD and then compared with other activities similarly represented.

At present the CompendiumLD tool is designed to be used by teachers in analysing learning activity narratives and in building learning activities ab initio. It does not have a representation that the student can consult directly, although it is expected that the student will experience the added clarity and effectiveness of the learning activity that has benefited from being articulated and analysed in CompendiumLD. Work on a student representation of a CompendiumLD learning activity is being taken up at present.

Advantages of Employing CompendiumLD

There are particular advantages in using the CompendiumLD tool in analytic or synthetic mode in relation to a learning activity:

• It provides a very clear picture of the expected process of study for any LA, however initially represented. After translation of the structure of different versions of the activity into the CompendiumLD graphical space, comparisons of the effectiveness of the pedagogic structures of each of these different versions can more easily be effected
• CompendiumLD can simultaneously represent multiple levels of pedagogic activity, from the course level, though the learning activity level down to the individual learning task, considered as the basic element of a LD. The impact of change at any one level on the activities at the other two levels can be seen directly in the graphical representations of activity at these levels. The graphical representation demonstrates these effects much more directly than a narrative representation would
• CompendiumLD will allow more than one user to work simultaneously on any particular LD. The evolving design that is the product of their collective work can be a subject of discussion and analysis amongst the members of the designing group. For example, changing the order of tasks in a particular design will have consequences for the logical structure of the activity, which will be immediately perceivable to members of the designing group and can form the basis of productive discussion.

Applying CompendiumLD to Learning Design Case Studies

In terms of capturing performance in a graphical space the current project has demonstrated its effectiveness by representing each of over 30 case studies of innovative performance using functionality of the OU’s current VLE. The diagrams generated in the CompendiumLD interface give a succinct and useful representation of the activities in each case study and allow analysis of each activity, along with comparison of task structures between case studies.

Problems and next steps

Amongst the aspects of the OU Learning Design project that remain to be pursued, two stand out with respect to the CompendiumLD work. The first is the contribution that the CompendiumLD representation can make towards the evaluation of the pedagogic effectiveness of any particular LA in its “home setting”. If the evaluation of the pedagogic effectiveness of an LA in a particular instance is strongly positive, then the application of the same LA in a cognate discipline may be undertaken with more confidence. But the initial evaluation may have to be conducted through pilots in the standard fashion, which is a time-consuming operation. The second is the degree of generic applicability that can be imputed to a given LA, allowing wide reuse across disciplines. Both these aspects are currently being pursued and it is clear that the CompendiumLD representations have a lot to contribute to answering these questions and taking forward the achievements of LD to the improvement in the effectiveness and return-on investment in teaching and learning support in higher education.

The development of the CLouDworks site has only begun recently. A visioning workshop was run in February 2008 to begin to sketch out the nature of the site. This was used as the basis for the development of a prototype. Current work is concentrating on populating the site with learning designs, resources and tools. The next stage will be to increase the level of social networking functionality associated with the site, trial it with users and run a series of ‘designfests’ to develop a critical mass of resources.

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