Characterising learning designs Saturday, April 18, 2009

If we want to support the design of high quality learning, and to promote the reuse of designs, then we need to find suitable ways of both representing designs and of utilising those representations.

I've been reading a paper by Grainne Conole that focuses on these issues and in particular on how representations of learning designs can be used to scaffold and support the generation of new designs.

The paper focuses on two central questions:

• How can learning designs be captured and represented?
• What best supports the process of designing/creating learning activities?

Conole identifies the contradiction that:

(a) in order to be easy to understand and apply, designs need to be simple but simple designs may fail to capture enough detail

(b) rich, detailed descriptions can be 'difficult to understand and time consuming to apply' (p189)

She identifies 5 types of design:

• narrative or case studies
• patterns
  
• vocabularies
• diagrammatic or iconic representations
• models

Learning designs differ in a number of respects:

• their format of presentation - text, visual, auditory, multimedia
• their degree of contextualisation (from abstract to contextualised)
• level of granularity
• degree of structure (flat vocabulary v typology)

The table below maps the characteristics of designs created with three different tools:

Characteristics of 3 learning design representations

Click on the image to view the full-size table.


References

Conole, G. (2008), 'The role of mediating artefacts in learning design' in Lockyer, L., Bennett, S., Agostinho, S. and Harper, B. (eds) Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies, pp. 187-209, Hersey PA, IGI Global.