Learning Design
Digital learning content: a designer's guide
This guide is for anyone with an interest in helping others to learn. You may be a teacher, trainer, lecturer or coach. You may be a subject expert with knowledge you want to share or an experienced practitioner who wants to pass on their tips. You may already be a creator of learning content, looking to update their skills. Whatever your interest, this guide will help you to design learning materials that really make a difference. Digital learning content takes a wide variety of forms, including tutorials, scenarios, podcasts, screencasts, videos, slideshows, quizzes and reference materials. This guide provides you with fundamental principles that you can apply to any content creation activity as well as practical information relating to specific content types. We are fast approaching a point where all learning content will be digital and online. It's time to join the revolution, to contribute as much as you consume. Your learning journey starts here.
Designing for Learning in an Open World
The book proposes new, innovative learning pathways, created to empower learners to blend formal educational offerings with free resources and services. The new approach and new pathways suggested by the author, Grainne Conole, force readers to rethink the entire instructional design process, enabling both teachers and learners to take into account a blended learning context, now the norm in our modern educational environment.
Web 2.0. suported Higher Education Institutional Learning Scenarios for Collaborative Learning
Project WebWise brings together a range of European higher education institutions (from Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Slovenia, Greece and Great Britain) active in the field of public health education as well as experts for innovating e-learning, to analyze, experiment and develop innovative learning scenarios within public health education.
The general objective of WebWise is to support the improvement, the quality, the efficiency and the accessibility of Higher Education using the structure of the Bologna process and the innovative methodological collaborative Web 2.0. learning tools.
Within this objective, the project will aim to:
- Identify innovative learning scenarios and learning designs within public health or general health education.
- Suggest and test a number of innovations to improve the learning process within the scenarios
- Identify and elaborate the key improvements from the pilots.
- Recommend how such improvements may be transferred in public health education and to other areas of Higher Education.
- Disseminate recommendations to competent authorities on a national and European level.
TARGET GROUPS
- Regulatory bodies
- Managers
- Deliverers
- Users
in public health and public health related study programmes.
OUTCOMES
- Recommendations for optimizing learning scenarios
- Best practices database
eLearning Papers special edition presented in OEB workshop on Creative Learning Environments
Director of the eLearning Papers editorial board, Tapio Koskinen, along with Dr. Gráinne Conole, guest editor of the journal issue n.27 Designing for learning, presented a widely-attended workshop earlier this month at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN in collaboration with Lieve Van den Brande, a Principal Administrator at the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission. Also in attendance was Pierre-Antoine Ullmo, founder of P.A.U. Education.
The session, which had more than 80 participants, was promoted through LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Addressing the new European initiative to overcome the implementation gap of technology in education, the workshop presented material from the new special issue of eLearning Papers, focussing on best practice experiences and concrete examples that demonstrate how good learning design can make a difference.
The event also launched the first tablet version of eLearning Papers. This interactive PDF format, suitable for all tablets, marks a new and exciting direction for the journal. Workshop attendees interacted with the tablet and were able to experiment with its functionality.
Drawing on the material from eLearning papers, the workshop focused on the following issues:
- What are the implications of new social and participatory media for education and how can they be harnessed more effectively to support learning?
- What are the different ways in which learning interventions can be represented?
- How can social networking and other dialogic tools be used to enable teachers to share and discuss their learning and teaching practices, ideas and designs?
- What are the implications for learners, teachers and institutions of new social and participatory media?
- What new pedagogies are emerging as a result of the use of new social and participatory media?
- How are Open Educational Resources being design, used and repurposed?
The workshop opened with an introduction by Tapio Koskinen that discussed the history and current role of eLearning Papers. Tapio is Executive Committee Member of European Distance and e-Learning Network – EDEN, Board member of the Finnish eLearning Centre and Director of the Editorial Board of eLearning Papers. He is currently Head of New Solutions at Aalto Professional Development, extension of Aalto University. Since 1995 he has been participating in the work of several European R&D and training projects. His works include NoE Prolearn roadmapping (FP6) and Time2Learn roadmapping (FP5). In 2011 he was invited as a rapporteur for the Digital Agenda Assembly workshop: “Mainstreaming e-Learning in education and training”.
Next, Lieve Van den Brande, presented the talk: “Creative learning environments: a new European initiative to overcome the implementation gap”. Lieve is a Principal Administrator at the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission. She is responsible for "ICT for learning" both in terms of policies as parts of the Lifelong learning programme. She holds a Ph.D. in educational sciences from the University of Liège and has several degrees in education, psychology and teacher training. Lieve has been working for more than 20 years at the EC: DG Information Society around 'Telematics for Education and Training'; DG Research around social sciences research and now since 4 years at DG EAC on e-Learning and digital competences. Lieve is also a member of the Editorial Board of eLearning Papers.
Afterwards, Gráinne Conole offered a comprehensive presentation of the state of the art on designing for learning. Gráinne is Professor at University of Leicester since September 2011. Previously she was Professor of e-learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. Gráinne has research interests in the use, integration and evaluation of Information and Communication Technologies and e-learning and impact on organisational change. Her latest book about Learning Design will be out any time soon. She guest edited the eLearning Papers special issue on Learning Design that will be published in this workshop.
The workshop ended by opening the floor to the audience members for discussion. The eLearning Papers board members were pleased to have the chance to interact with readers and contributers of the journal, and to receive their enthusiastic responses to the tablet format. The board looks forward sharing the journals' new issues and further developments with them, as they arise.
eLearning Papers 27 Designing for learning. Published!
This 27th edition of eLearning Papers focuses on learning design, with the aim of clarifying and disseminating different perspectives and practices in the field.
The articles in this issue's In-depth section address how to best understand and use learning design, both in terms of tools and methodologies. The first pair of articles look at practical conceptualisations of learning design, supported by case examples. Dobozy's paper offers a three-tiered categorisation of learning design, while Buendía-García and Benlloch-Dualde's study attempts to track patterns in different learning scenarios and applies them to new learning design contexts. The second pair of articles reviews blended teaching or the increased participation of students in designing learning. Cameron and Tanti look at the usefulness of social media in authorising students to actively design their learning processes and Ligorio reviews six years of experimentation with a Blended Collaborative Constructive Participation (BCCP) model at the university level.
In From the Field, two classroom models are shared. Each report offers an example of teachers who have taken personalised approaches to integrating learning design strategies into their every day practices.
Taken together the articles in this special issue provide an up to date and authoritative overview of the field of learning design research and demonstrate the diversity of research that is going on in this area. “Designing for learning is the key challenge facing education today – practitioners need guidance and support to ensure that their design is pedagogically informed and effective, making innovative use of the affordances that new technologies offer” (Conole, G. Designing for learning in an open world, New York: Springer)
You can read the Special Edition in your tablet. Click here!
Creating Invitational Online Learning Environments Using Art-Based Learning Interventions
Effective online learning environments are inviting; infused with respect, trust, intentionality, and optimism (Purkey, 2007).
Arts-based learning interventions like Reflective Poetry, Minute at the Movies Analysis, “Our Community” Soap Scenes, and Theme Songs facilitate invitational online classes. These inexpensive, adaptable interventions enhance learning environments by encouraging human connections and creativity.
Knowledge-building: Designing for learning using social and participatory media
This report presents the results of a classroom action research that looked at how one teacher redesigned her curriculum while integrating social media, Web 2.0 and face-to-face teaching in an Australian public high school.
It explores the qualities that social and participatory media bring to the classroom while focussing on students as active and valued participants in the learning process. Building knowledge using the uniqueness of social media enabled students to become active and valued resources for both the teacher and their peers. Designing for learning is a key challenge facing education today; this case offers ideas for learning designers and contributes to a research base that can support educators from all sectors.
Blended Collaborative Constructive Participation (BCCP): A model for teaching in higher education
The Blended Collaborative Constructive Participation (BCCP) model is a university teaching model built upon six years of experimentation.
Through a flexible structure and a set of six types of activities, the aim of this model is to put into practice a series of already well-established pedagogical principles, such as the Community of Learners, the Community of Practice, the socio-constructivist dimension, the dialogical perspective, and knowledge building.
A three-level system is presented as an assessment tool for web-forum discussions, organized around the contents of the course. This system is meant to be used by teachers and by students to monitor and support the evolution of the discussion.
Students as learning designers: Using social media to scaffold the experience
The ‘students as learning designers’ approach challenges transmission models of pedagogy and requires teachers to relinquish some control to their students so that they might have the space to experiment and discover how to learn.
This paper outlines the findings of two studies that allowed students to explore new ways of learning, where they were encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning, and outlines what potential social media tools may have in facilitating this experience. These projects demonstrate that when students are empowered to design their own learning activities, they can deeply engage in the learning process.