Learning design

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Definition

Learning Design describes the educational process, not just courseware but the whole teaching/learning experience. It's a more or less formal description of a pedagogical scenario (also called educational script or storyboard).

“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.”(James Dalziel, retrieved 18:53, 4 June 2007 (MEST)).

Learning Design and educational technology

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).

(James Dalziel, retrieved 18:53, 4 June 2007 (MEST)).


Learning Design theory is a new attempt to describe the foundational elements of the educational process. It provides conceptual and technical tools to describe who is involved in a learning activity, what resources are required for the activity, how the activity is conducted, and most importantly, how a collection of activities are structured into a Learning Design(also called a unit of learning, sequence of learning activities, digital lesson plan, etc). Two distinguishing features of recent work are (1) the description of Learning Designs in machine readable formats so that they can be runby software systems, and (2) the ability to store Learning Designs, and hence share them, search for them, re-use them, adapt them and so on. Taken together, these features of Learning Designs have the potential to transform teaching and learning through the sharing and implementation of good practice. More fundamentally, Learning Design theory may provide a new way to conceptualise the educational process via a shared vocabulary for describing learning activities and how they are combined.
James Dalziel, ED-MEDIA 2006 Learning Design Keynote, retrieved 18:53, 4 June 2007 (MEST).)

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