roles in learning design

[yi...@olds.ac.uk]

Rose Heaney (‏@romieh) asks: 

"can some helpful person point me in direction of 'fruitful' discussions on learning design roles? 

I mean the people involved. Is it a specialist role? Is it something all teachers should embrace? That kind of thing"

I think this is a very interesting question, and I don't think there's a single clear answer:

- are we aiming for "teachers as designers", or is "learning designer" a professional expertise and teachers only implement given design?

- what about learners as designers of their own learning?

- is design something that happens long before the actual enactment, or can we think of real-time participatory responsive design? 

[Arthur Oglesby]

I used the search box in cloudworks and got this:

http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2476

[Rose Heaney]

Many years ago when we tended to refer to elearning as CAL or CBT I was a freelance instructional designer, a term that is still used in some contexts but not generally in UK HE. This role varied from client to client (I wasn't working in education then) but generally speaking it involved working closely with subject matter experts (SMEs) & other client side specialists to determine learning outcomes, identify content sources & agree the approach. This was followed by storyboarding or designing a series of technology based training activities for implementation by a technical team of programmers, graphic designers etc. Occasionally I used authoring packages so was involved in both design & development. The resources often had voiceover so I spent many an hour in recording studios ensuring voiceover artists understood the script and could read it in meaningful way etc. (Budgets tended to be significant as the final product was destined for large audiences in multinational companies, gov't depts etc., and was going to save the costs of face to face training - at least that was the theory).  An understanding of the typical student (trainee) was  usually gleaned at the outset via the SME but the content was designed remotely from them and I was never asked to stay around for delivery other than maybe some beta testing with a sample set of users. At any rate, the outputs of these projects were often very generic and aimed at a wide cross section of people so a detailed understanding of the target population would have had little impact on the design other than perhaps to ensure it catered for the lowest common denominator of prior knowledge & experience. This is a long way from 21st century curriculum design & development in HE (and from the learning technologies & design tools now at our disposal) so I'm not sure it's worth making too many connections. However, the existence of a multiplicity of roles and their interdependence seems quite pertinent. In my current context learning design in the loose sense of the term has the potential to involve teaching staff (and students), learning technologists (my role), content developers & occasionally someone actually called a learning designer but this is a dying role for some reason. However we are often not working effectively together .......

I am being told by my employer to think about going home because of the snow so I will continue this later .... however any thoughts in the meantime are welcome. Apologies for the ramble ....

[Yishay Mor]

I think roles vary by institutional context. It would be interesting to map out a few scenarios. Can you edit this?

http://bit.ly/11EkP6k

[Heather Peters]

Ummm...

Not meaning to be rude/precious/etc but the basic arrangement of the model shows the designer in the centre surrounded by student - teacher - manager. If this is a widely held vision in the 'designer community' - sorry, that's the most encompassing name I can come up with and in this context I am excluding teachers from that community - then I think I can see the core of the problems that arise between teacher-designer working relationships. 

I think that if you consider what teachers are taught in their training, and what they actually do, and how they design their courses it becomes clear that teaching is designing. Teachers roles include - mapping out learning goals, determining how to design activities/etc to best help students achieve those goals, considering who their students are and what skill sets they bring to the classroom, reflecting on activities, modifying based on learner experience and success, updating to make what is taught relevant to the current context, following research/etc related to the topics they teach in order to maintain their 'content expertise', and so on and so on and so on; it is hard to argue that teachers are not designers. Many also have the technical skills required to use the technologies related to online learning - web design etc

And, it is always a puzzle to me how narrow a definition seems to be given to 'teacher' in relation to learning design. Teachers aren't just information deliverers/group facilitators/markers - their roles go well beyond that definition.

Again, I'm not meaning to offend or be argumentative but am truly interested in finding a way to improve the working relationships required for course design.

[Rose Heaney]

I seem to have lost a post I did last night - feel like the students who always struggle with the simplest technologies. Anyway - back to the diagram - when I open it on the Mac in Safari or Firefox I get this - no editing facilities available at all. I opened a free account but still can't access this.

Heather I agree re: central role for the teacher but it's complicated ..... we might need to define 'teacher', In complex online learning design we may not know who all the 'teachers' are at the outset etc.

[Yishay Mor]

Hi all,

I think this link works better:

http://www.lucidchart.com/invitations/accept/50f985c9-3e14-4433-af6b-18ac0a7ab50a

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

 

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[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

I've just read this thread and find the replies interesting.  This is something I am also thinking about in my role as a 'manager' of e-learning in a UK university.  We do not have many of the roles mentioned here. Or I guess you can say that the same person does a lot of them to varying degrees. I'm grappling with how to help these people who do not have much time and who may not be adequately resourced to design and develop courses. What often happens is they comile them from existing resources and activities.  I've just blogged about this if anyone's interested - http://thedigitalday.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/olds-mooc-w2d22-but-im-not-the-designer/

Best wishes,

Bob Ridge-Stearn

[Penny Bentley]

Heather, what you have said here is a like a breath of fresh air. I've been a maths and science teacher for 25 years and have many tricks up my sleeve to ''contextualise" concepts such as the Fibionacci series and Pi to assist 13 to 15 year olds. 

Penny 

[Rose Heaney]

Thanks for the blog post Bob

This resonates a lot for me - like you, I am an elearning specialist in UK HE where my current most pressing situation, and the reason I joined this mooc, is to support & advise academics trying to revise an online (distance) course that was originally designed by a central unit with specialist designers & developers.  The unit is gradually downsizing to the point of extinction leaving the academicsto pick up the pieces & keep the show on the road. They are looking for checklists & frameworks to follow I think but would never join a mooc (or any other course) to try to work these things out for themselves. I am trying to distil some essentials from this one and actually think the EOR framework may be useful at some levels.

I hope to meet up shortly with a couple of key staff to mull over my experience of the last 2 weeks. They are quite enthusiastic about my attendance so maybe I'll pull them into some of the discussions in due course - the great advantage of a mooc is this level of flexibility.

Rose

[Joshua Underwood]

Rose,

Will be really interested to see how you use the EoR framework.

Josh

[Yishay Mor]

Hi Rose, 

One of the scenarios we designed for was organic teams (like your own) using the MOOC to work together through a genuine project they are committed to. If you do manage to pull them in, please let us know and tell us how it works.

Yishay

[Yishay Mor]

I posted this comment on Bob's blog, I thought I should share it here:

Hi Bob,

You might not be the course designer, but it seems like you have another learning design challenge to deal with: how do you get the course team to see themselves as learning designers (rather than, as often happens, content producers).

So, here’s a dare: can you, by the end of this MOOC, devise a 30 minute “introduction to learning design” activity for your academics, one that would seed a change in their professional practice?

Yishay

On Sunday, 20 January 2013 18:08:43 UTC, Rose Heaney wrote:

[Sue Watling]

On the subject of roles in learning design (specifically online learning design), my institution is developing a digital education strategy; we’re hoping the process will highlight the need for increased resources for the digital enhancement of T&L. Other than the adhoc support myself and colleagues (Teaching and Learning Coordinators) can offer there is no central learning design or content creation team/individuals. The stretching of our remit underpinned my MOOC proposal for building a DIY approach to the use of multimedia resources. In my mind it was about doing more with less and empowering staff with the essential tools for working with video and audio. However a colleague has suggested it could end up giving the institution an excuse not to provide central learning design resource. This point of view hadn't occurred to me and I thought it worth sharing. Has anyone else tried to take on digital development and have it jump around and bite them? I still think DIY Multimedia has validity; anything which develops digital literacies in a digital environment must be good – mustn’t it????

On Friday, 18 January 2013 12:20:38 UTC, yi...@olds.ac.uk wrote:

[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

Hi Yishay,
Why not? I think this could be a good idea. I'll let you know how I get on.

Bob Ridge-Stearn.

[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

I responded too quickly...  I now realised you're proposing an activity lasting 30 minutes.  That's a challenge and a half. It would be difficult enough to do a 30 minute presentation.  I'll think about what might be done. Bob.

[Ignatia/Inge de Waard]

Hi all, 

Great discussion on the roles of design. I have added interactive content to the Lucidchart, as I believe this type of content will become more important with the rise of the semantic web. And in a way it is already possible for many things, even the simple multiple choices can be designed to pull in more actions, making the content part of the design by its embedded interactivity. 

Having said that, to me there is the niche for the instructional designer. Making content interactive (really reacting on the path and actions of the learner to result in an adaptive design) is something non-instructional designers cannot do. So even if DYI multimedia is pushed, or other options, a teacher/manager... can - at the moment - not accumulate all technological options that a specialized instructional designer can do. To me, the solutions to increase necessary capacity and need for instructional designers lies in the fact of specialization in such areas. To me it is not enough to define roles, the people/content behind those roles must also change to become capable of things that make their role unique. 

Inge

[Bob Ridge-Stearn]

Hi Inge,

Just realised who you are! Have been reading your articles about MOOCs in Learning Solutions. Very clear and practical :-)

Bob

[Yishay Mor]

Yes, Inga - great to have you here and thanks for your contributions!

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[Julie Lirot]

I think one of the problems/challenges that we are facing is the separation of roles.  Teachers cannot be separate from design and Designers cannot be separate from teaching.  If a teacher can not design a course based on their content, then a designer is not going to be able to make that course successful, just as if a designer has never taught and does not understand class dynamics, they are not going to be able to design anything that has a chance of being successful in the real world.  I think the difference right now is on how well does a designer understand the technologies that can help the instructor reach, engage, and communicate with students (and students among themselves).  Right now there is a big debate whether our role is as "Instructional Technologist" or "Instructional Designer" and there is a great deal of confusion over what those roles actually mean and what comprises their primary responsibilities.

[Rose Heaney]

Thanks for all your input to this.

I am so caught up in a VLE change at my place of work that I have very little time to contribute further at the moment.

Suffice to say this discussion serves to highlight that there are many roles in design but which real life roles are responsible will vary from place to place. How the roles interact and their relative influence is important too (there was a tweet about this somewhere). For example, an individual teacher may have some say over how they deliver a particular module/activity & how they engage their student cohort in design adaptations as the module runs but have very little say over the technologies available and the general design principles applied to the overall programme of which their module is only a part.

and so on ..... 

[Ignatia/Inge de Waard]

Hi Rose, 

Indeed it depends on the context of the learning or training institution. And the existing workload or changes we are all involved in. 

In addition to that there is a discussion that is currently taking place in Belgium on teachers and their responsibilities. I feel that teachers are already under a lot of stress due to the increased workload and increased responsibilities towards their role towards the students and making those students critical thinkers and such. Putting instructional design - be it DIY or institutionally guided - on top of their creativity is simply asking too much. It might look as thought it saves money, but in reality we might undermine the teacher/professor/training corps by simply asking too much. In an ideal world we would revise the roles and make them feasable or humanly durable. 

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Inge (Ignatia) de Waard

Blog / Twitter / LinkedIn / Presentations

[Yishay Mor]

Inga,

For me the ideal of teachers-as-designers is not about adding to their load but about shifting it. Empowering teachers by acknowledging what they are allready doing and equiping them to do it better.

Yishay

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[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

No need to apologize for the ramble :-)

What you describe STILL happens today in a lot of corporate instructional design.  A colleague of mine wrote this recently (I've paraphrased a bit to protect the innocent ;-)  ):

I was asked to give a presentation on applying Instructional Design to PowerPoint Presentations created by subject matter experts. Anyone willing to share they know-how? :)

At my company we are assigned a project to develop elearning. We work with the SMEs. They handle the expertise and we ID it and develop it further.

Things we usually have to do:

Remove half the bullet points into the script

Rewrite the script to reduce the wording

Delete uneeded pictures

Move screen shots of computer programs into captivate

Add audio and animation

Redo the objectives

Reduce the amount of training or split up the course into smaller chunks.

Add quizzes

This to me is process, not instructional design.  I think a lot gets lost in the translation of what learning design and instructional design are. Starting with a product in mind is not instructional design. The design part gets to you a product, but it isn't design if you've already made up your mind ;-)  I try to point this out to people whenever I get a chance :)

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

I've only got my university (and a few others from my friends) as examples, but in the US HE instructional designers were never plentiful.  In our university we only had 1 instructional designer for online for the entire university, and we only recently got a couple more after a number of years of just having one. I do think that the instructors need to know this stuff, but as SMEs they don't have the time to always be on top of everything.  I do believe that there is a need for instructional designers but faculty also need to bear the brunt of the responsibility for this :-)

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

Yishay, I agree with you :-)

In our institutions of HE our faculty are responsible for research and publishing (also known as "publish or perish"), departmental committee obligations, program improvement and outreach, and teaching. I do think that most of our faculty are well meaning, but at the end of the day something's gotta give, and that does happen to be design and improvement of courses sadly enough. In order to expect faculty to do more in the realm of design and course improvement, other areas need to be lessened.

[Apostolos Koutropoulos]

"Right now there is a big debate whether our role is as "Instructional Technologist" or "Instructional Designer" and there is a great deal of confusion over what those roles actually mean and what comprises their primary responsibilities"

You can say that again :-) I honestly view them as one in the same. An instructional designer should be a good technologists, and a technologists should be a good designer. I don't separate them. I have a degree in instructional design, and for a while I did do instructional design as my day job, but my title was instructional technologist.  If anyone wants to articulate the theoretical differences I am all ears :)

[Rebecca Galley]

We interviewed staff across five universities as part of the JISC funded OULDI project and one of the clear themes that came through was that there is a shift taking place in regards to Curriculum Dedign roles in many institutions. A wider range of roles are becoming involved in pedagogical decisions, and see themselves as responsible for student experience. Similarly Tom Brown's lit review: 'The positioning of educational technologists in enhancing student experience' found similarly (see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/1872). However, we also found that views about what a good learning experience is differed enormously across roles. The could be seen to be creating significant tensions between staff groups and was impacting on design practice. In part we hoped that the design tools we developed (see week 3 stuff) would help mediate dialogue between staff groups so teams could better get to a shared understanding.