Sandy Britain's report A Review of Learning Design: Concept, Specification and Tools (Word document) is an excellent resource for anyone wanting a grounding in Learning Design (LD) and learning design (yes, I did repeat that). The report is part of the JISC E-Learning Pedagogy Programme. Read on for more. Sandy's document does a good job of highlighting the difference in emphasis of this model of e-learning from the mainly content-focused orientation of current practice.
“Whereas instructional design in e-learning has focussed predominantly on learning objects as the core entity within a course or other programme of learning, learning design, as we have seen, is centred on learning activities. The underlying reason for this shift in emphasis is the feeling amongst many educators that the learning objects approach places too much emphasis on content delivery rather than looking more carefully at what learners do. Also software environments for elearning (VLEs) have been designed to cater for this rather simplistic content-delivery model at the expense of a variety of pedagogical models that are built around collaborative activity on the part of learners.” (page 3)
I wholeheartedly support this change of emphasis as a welcome antidote to those 'teachers' or learning system developers who repeatedly confuse learning with content provision. At the same time, I think it's also important that we don't become 'activity fundamentalists'. We need, surely, to develop learning support/facilitation systems that help users to align learning outcomes (their own and an institutions), assessments (if required/desired), activities/events, and resources (objects, artefacts etc)? Sometimes a prescribed workflow is the best way and sometimes it may not be. Like real life sometimes sequential access/presentation is best and sometimes random access is what's required.
Despite the above caveats, Sandy's document also inspired me to follow up on what could be an important Learning Design development, i.e. implementations based on the Open University of the Netherland's (OUNL) open source Coppercore runtime engine.
The JISC E-Learning Programme's Framework and Tools strand includes a project by the UK's Open University in partnership with the OUNL to develop a “Service Based Learning Design System” (scroll down the list the Word format proposal document is at the bottom). I understand that the 'toolkit' should be available in the final quarter of this year.
Anything which enables Learning Design to move beyond concept and into implementation is to be welcomed. As are solutions which enable LD to be 'run' from within any web page not just a VLE. A recent Auricle article The Changing Identity of the Proprietary VLE? recently commented on the OUNL/Blackboard alliance which aims to make LD available from within that product.
Perhaps I don't yet know enough to know whether I should be concerned or not about the apparent dependence on Java2EE as the underlying engine for Coppercore? Any guidance would be welcome.
Finally, I understand that Sandy has now moved to New Zealand. We can only hope that the very technologies he has done so much to analyse/develop over the years will enable him to continue contributing to the thinking of the sector.
