Learning design and orchestration?

[Yishay Mor]

Adam makes an interesting comment:

"There is a military saying that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy and perhaps the same is true of learning designs and learners!"

For me, this raises the question of the relationship between learning design and learning "orchestration" (see below). 

So, what is the relationship between learning design and orchestration?

"Many scholars have used "orchestration" to refer to the design and real-time management of multiple classroom activities, various learning processes and numerous teaching actions [...]. Intutively, this metaphor is appealing. Music writers and teachers both have to harmonize multiple "voices". They both need a finegrained control of time. They both translate a global message (emotions, knowledge) into a sequence of atomic actions (notes, interactions). [...]

Unfortunately, the classroom "orchestration" seems to have a different meaning than its musical counterpart. In music, orchestration refers to writing the score that an orchestra will play. It does not refer to the activity of the conductor when the orchestra is playing. [...] Applied to the educational context, the proper meaning of "orchestrating" would correspond to instructional design and not to the real time management of classroom activities. 

Nevertheless, metaphors don't have to be perfect to be inspiring. The key difference between music orchestration and classroom orchestrations is that, when orchestrating a classroom, the score has often to be modified on the fly."

Dillenbourg, P. & Jermann, P. (2010), 'Technology for classroom orchestration', New science of learning 2010 , 525-552. http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2c1c1b8778a177d0b42a2a8dc4942d8b6/yish

Yishay
____________________
Dr. Yishay Mor
Senior Lecturer, Educational Technology
http://iet.open.ac.uk/people/yishay.mor
+44 1908 6 59373

 

On 15 January 2013 18:03, Adam <a.j.w...@soton.ac.uk> wrote:

Thanks Yishay - that was really helpful. I'll spend some time comparing the various representations of the same activity (a session for school children on 'healthy eating'). From a first browse through I was struck by the contrast between the neatness of the diagrams ("this is how it works") and the messy reality of the Design Narrative ("this is how it really worked the first time we used it in a challenging school situation"). There is a military saying that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy and perhaps the same is true of learning designs and learners! I suspect that as we approach the end of the first week here that you understand this all too well :-) Still, adapt, improvise and press on...

Adam

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[Ida Brandão]

Hello Yishar,

The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design also uses the analogy of music to argue about the pedagogical neutrality of Learning Design, saying that «music notation provides a single framework for describing many different styles of music (classical, romantic, modern, etc)...LD provides also a general framework for describing any different styles/pedagogies, and any given instance of a style could be assessed as a beautiful/effective for learning or mediocre/innefective for learning.»
I'm not sure about this approach of neutrality, an «ism» is usually guiding us...
Ida

[Luis P.]

The relationship between learning design and orchestration is unclear at best, since there is no clear definition of orchestration of learning either. Indeed, the issue of whether design is part of orchestration or not was much discussed in a workshop on orchestration at the CSCL conference in 2011 (http://www.isls.org/cscl2011/doc/CSCL2011ProceedingsVol3.pdf, p. 1199).

Funny thing is that Dillenbourg himself largely dismisses the role of design in orchestration in his latest works, although I do believe that the relationship is crucial, since we always design so that the design can be then enacted/performed with students (see Prieto et al. (2011), "Orchestrating technology enhanced learning: a literature review and a conceptual framework", International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(6), pp. 583-598;  http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticletoc.php?jcode=ijtel&year=2011&vol=3&issue=6). 

However, this relationship also depends a lot on the actors involved: is the designer the same person that "runs" the design with students? how much does the designer know about the enactment setting? who does the translation between the design and the infrastructure used for the enactment? etc. This is largely dependent on the setting.

Other thoughts on this?

LP

[Joshua Underwood]

Can design be done in real-time? If it is done in real-time is it no longer design? Often learning design is distributed and re-designed on the fly, no? A text book is designed and authored and implemented as paper (or digital resource) and some kind of plan for using it is 'designed' and then sometimes 're-designed' and enacted on the fly by teachers and learners. Or am I using design to broadly here?

[Paige Cuffe]

Looking at this together with Luis' point, this is where I have struggled with the notion of defining design.  If  action is the result of conscious choice, when does a choice become a design?  Or is design a vision of a pathway to learning, on a topic, with proposed activities and resources to support that journey?
When I think of poorly designed sessions, course or even moocs, I have seen, it is from these that I have - ironically - learnt the most about 'teaching'.  But those that don't work well aren't all failing in the same way.  For some, it is this idea of being too scripted (especially when those designing and delivering are not one and the same) and don't allow for spontaneous change.  Others change too readily and wander a great deal without arriving anywhere.  Many appear to have no overarching vision. 

Ultimately, for myself, I want a learning experience to do a little more than 'change my practice or understanding', I want an organised experience to do that but more quickly than if I had chosen to learn alone.  I do want my thinking challenged.  I do want guidance.  I do want to stand on the shoulders of others.  I don't want to walk the same long pathway as those before me, I want them to have stood on the other side of the valley, looked back, and discovered a more efficient pathway to get to the same place.  Maybe that is what constitutes 'design' for me, not an accidental blundering through the bushes to the other side, but looking to help learners do it better than I did.

Can that notion of design be done in real-time?  If the teacher is more experienced than myself, has spent more time steeped in the topic, yes.  Maybe looking back through the eyes of new travellers sparks understanding in the moment for the teacher of a quicker, better path.  Is this 'real-time' approach something that can be undertaken by someone not well versed in the topic?  Can we use non-(subject) specialists for primary design but do subject specialist have to be the re-designers?

[Joshua Underwood]

Thoughtful post Paige. I was thinking along the same lines. Effective re-design on the fly probably does required expertise that can be drawn on rapidly without too much conscious effort. So, how do we gain that kind of skill? Through experience in the field? Are there ways to accelerate this process and better share this expertise? I think Luis et al's work (at least the way I read it) is useful here. Maybe we can discover and formally represent patterns for re-design on the fly and through study and use of these accelerate the path to expertise?

WRT to your point about learning from bad learning design (all design) that is why every activity in this week finishes by asking you to reflect on the activity, though evidently many people won't need that prompt. That said we have attempted to design and offer pathways we believe will be worthwhile... though exploring and blundering through the bushes may also produce worthwhile outcomes.

[pmi...@liv.ac.uk]

I think of design as no more than the intentional arrangement or inter-relating of parts, even if the intentional is intended to lead to the emergent. On that basis I don't see any objection to designing "on the fly" and you can have good as well as bad design as Josh says.

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

I think that there is an interplay between LD and LO.

I think LO is an absolute necessity (unless you take the teacher out of the content and just deal with self-paced learning).  I think LD can design for many different possibilities that can be used as the class is in progress. You may  start with one set of plans, but there is definitely the ability to change, and you should have alternatives to pursue during that session that help the learner meet the learning objectives for the week/session/module/whatever.  Learner analysis is one of the elements in instructional design (and I assume LD), so knowing your learner is important.  Of course, when you design a course, you don't always have the luxury of knowing exactly who your learners are, but you have a pretty good idea based on the pre-requisites of the course.  Adaptation is an important part after this :)

AK

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

Quote "Ultimately, for myself, I want a learning experience to do a little more than 'change my practice or understanding', I want an organised experience to do that but more quickly than if I had chosen to learn alone.  I do want my thinking challenged.  I do want guidance.  I do want to stand on the shoulders of others.  I don't want to walk the same long pathway as those before me, I want them to have stood on the other side of the valley, looked back, and discovered a more efficient pathway to get to the same place.  Maybe that is what constitutes 'design' for me, not an accidental blundering through the bushes to the other side, but looking to help learners do it better than I did."

I think ideally all (if not most) learning should be this way. Treading the same path as others have might be useful in some specific instances, but in order to learning to be real learning (as far as I am concerned) you need to connect what you are learning to your own situations and, to some extent, apply what is applicable. Not all learners are like this though, and some have conditioned to not be like this, so I am wondering how one designs to break down those barriers and old orthodoxies of what is is to learn while moving ahead with the course and not making the learner's heads spin :-)

[Yishay Mor]

hi Ida,

I like the music metaphor. We used it too in http://oro.open.ac.uk/33910/, and noted the analogy to Jazz, where the players improvise on an agreed score. Is learning design the same?

Yishay

[Paige Cuffe]

Yes!  I think this makes sense in terms of the need to adapt or 're-design' in the moment that we are talking about, as well as providing a way to consider Apostolos' point about bringing the learning back to your own setting [though I have some small issues with this] and applying it in a meaningful way [with which I completely agree].  Is this part of what the teacher is doing, to guide that process - hopefully by creating activities which facilitate this?  So we need a design, which has a structure and a suggested path, but which can divert within that as needed.

I'm wondering how much poor definition of context would affect this?  To continue the music metaphor for a bar longer... 
If we are unable to tightly define our learners' contexts, if we can't anticipate their needs, do we need to be better musicians in order to be able to adapt the score? 

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

As much as many teachers would hate this term, as I was reading your post I thought of the term "performer", specifically anyone who performs on a stage (musician, comedian, stage actors, etc.) who have a live audience and need to think on their feet. They have a plan, but audiences vary and the performer needs to be able to recognize the cues and adapt (or be booed off the stage) :-)

2013/1/20 Paige Cuffe <paige...@googlemail.com>

Yes!  I think this makes sense in terms of the need to adapt or 're-design' in the moment that we are talking about, as well as providing a way to consider Apostolos' point about bringing the learning back to your own setting [though I have some small issues with this] and applying it in a meaningful way [with which I completely agree].  Is this part of what the teacher is doing, to guide that process - hopefully by creating activities which facilitate this?  So we need a design, which has a structure and a suggested path, but which can divert within that as needed.

I'm wondering how much poor definition of context would affect this?  To continue the music metaphor for a bar longer... 
If we are unable to tightly define our learners' contexts, if we can't anticipate their needs, do we need to be better musicians in order to be able to adapt the score? 

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[Joshua Underwood]

Yes, on the fly adaptation (performance / orchestration) seems crucial to me. In face-to-face it may feel relatively easy to judge others reactions, how they are feeling and adapt (though this in't necessarily the case and you aren't always right - there has been some interesting work on technology to support this (Subtle Stone) and it is interesting to see that teachers often seem to say that what they appreciate (or would like to know) from classroom tech is the way it let's them know what learners are up to (perhaps they  often mean control?). Listen to the teacher in this 3 min clip about ipads or in this one from the Homework project (Homework project contributed to development of the EoR framework)

Interesting to think about different (MOOCs/f2f/blended/online/virtual worlds) environments and the extent to which these filter (constrain) this kind of performance. How adaptive/responsive do they allow teachers to be? How well do they allow learners & teachers to understand each other... ?

And also to think about how design is distributed amongst those that develop materials, activity plans, supporting technology, and those that orchestrate. Sometimes the same person, more often though responsibility for the 'complete design' is distributed.

[Yishay Mor]

Agree, I always say teaching is a performing art.

And while the metaphors fly, plays have scripts - 

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2891d28ab1319757f4063aad004771b37

Kobbe, L.; Weinberger, A.; Dillenbourg, P.; Harrer, A.; Hämäläinen, R.; Häkkinen, P. & Fischer, F. (2007), Specifying computer-supported collaboration scripts 'International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning' , International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc., , pp. 211-224 

And scripts can also be designed -

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/25d8308a03fe805acf4b06023245d6052

Villasclaras-Fernández, E. D.; Hernández-Leo, D.; Asensio-Pérez, J. I. & Dimitriadis, Y. (2009), 'Incorporating assessment in a pattern-based design process for CSCL scripts', Computers in Human Behavior 25 (5) , 1028 - 1039

[Joshua Underwood]

Hmmm, performer one of many possible teaching roles. Performer for me brings the teacher to the centre of the stage, which sometimes needs to be the case. 

Other times learner as performer, teacher as orchestrator, or maybe observer?

Multiple roles for teachers and/or learning designers to take on and often these are distributed across several people...

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

This is quite interesting "And also to think about how design is distributed amongst those that develop materials, activity plans, supporting technology, and those that orchestrate. Sometimes the same person, more often though responsibility for the 'complete design' is distributed."

Yesterday I was recording some quick presentations for my online course and one of the things that I mentioned was that there are times where a team of instructional designers, with different talents, will be needed. Some may possess ID + project management, others ID +  graphic design, others ID + whatever else the project needs. One person cannot do it all, and do it all well :)

On another topic, It's very interesting to think of filters in MOOCs.  This morning, in another thread (the language learning group in OLDS MOOC) someone wrote about the multiple layers in the MOOC. Just as he thinks he's discovered it all, there is even more. This may be discouraging for some, but encouraging to others. I learned a long time ago to be selective about my layers ;-)

2013/1/20 Joshua Underwood <josh.un...@gmail.com>

Yes, on the fly adaptation (performance / orchestration) seems crucial to me. In face-to-face it may feel relatively easy to judge others reactions, how they are feeling and adapt (though this in't necessarily the case and you aren't always right - there has been some interesting work on technology to support this (Subtle Stone) and it is interesting to see that teachers often seem to say that what they appreciate (or would like to know) from classroom tech is the way it let's them know what learners are up to (perhaps they  often mean control?). Listen to the teacher in this 3 min clip about ipads or in this one from the Homework project (Homework project contributed to development of the EoR framework)

Interesting to think about different (MOOCs/f2f/blended/online/virtual worlds) environments and the extent to which these filter (constrain) this kind of performance. How adaptive/responsive do they allow teachers to be? How well do they allow learners & teachers to understand each other... ?

And also to think about how design is distributed amongst those that develop materials, activity plans, supporting technology, and those that orchestrate. Sometimes the same person, more often though responsibility for the 'complete design' is distributed.

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[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

Perhaps more like jazz improvisation then than classical orchestration. I prefer this metaphor as a jazz band is constantly changing direction.  Improvisation allows space for soloing but respects and responds on the fly to all the band members' inputs. It's not chaotic - everyone knows the underlying melody and chord changes and they're all aiming for the same resolution.  

Think I'll go listen to Coltrane's My Favourite Things.  http://grooveshark.com/s/My+Favorite+Things/2EB2bL?src=5

Bob Rridge-Stearn

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

I was going to mention Jazz as an example, but since I am not a musician I didn't want to repeat "things I've heard" to be true :-)

2013/1/23 Bob Ridge-Stearn <bob.ridg...@newman.ac.uk>

Perhaps more like jazz improvisation then than classical orchestration. I prefer this metaphor as a jazz band is constantly changing direction.  Improvisation allows space for soloing but respects and responds on the fly to all the band members' inputs. It's not chaotic - everyone knows the underlying melody and chord changes and they're all aiming for the same resolution.  

Think I'll go listen to Coltrane's My Favourite Things.  http://grooveshark.com/s/My+Favorite+Things/2EB2bL?src=5

Bob Rridge-Stearn

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