This special issue titled The future of learning design considers the current issues and future pathway of a body of work known as learning design. This term, coined more than a decade ago, refers to research and development dedicated to the quest of equipping teachers with tools and strategies to aid their design of high‐quality learning environments.
Its origin stems from two lines of inquiry: (1) how to represent teaching practice from a technical perspective in the development and delivery of online learning environments, and (2) how to represent teaching practice in an appropriate form to enable teachers to share ideas about innovative online pedagogy and think about the process of design. The underlying premise of learning design is the notion that, if effective teaching and learning practice can be represented in a systematic way, this could then support the process of reuse, which could ultimately lead to improved practice.
This has resulted in a large body of work on an international scale that includes the specification of technical standards to support the delivery of online learning, the dissemination of ‘best practice’ examples (via a number of different learning design representations) to support and encourage adaptation and the development of software tools and strategies to support the design process.
The five articles presented in this special issue represent a snapshot of current thinking about learning design. Each article reports latest research conducted and offers a viewpoint on learning design. Importantly, the articles provide insight about the future direction of this field of research and development.
The special issue begins with the article by Falconer, Finlay and Fincher that provides a historical account of the origins of learning design and explains a body of work undertaken in the UK focused on the quest to find an effective representation of practice. A synthesis of three UK‐based research projects is provided all based on the premise that an effective representation of practice can be used by teachers to share pedagogical ideas and in doing so can develop, change and potentially improve their practice. Spanning the last five years and encompassing multiple projects, this research work explores the complexity of ‘capturing’ practice. The authors summarise key findings from three projects that examined different representations of practice – practice models, patterns and bundles. From this synthesis, a range of issues are explored namely: the tension between the perceived usefulness of generic abstractions of practice versus contextualised examples; the challenge of representing practice that includes both an intended plan or blueprint with advice on how to enact it; finding the right balance between the expressiveness and usability of a representational form; and examining how dialogue and discussion amongst a community may be a requirement for ‘effective’ use.
The article by Kali, Goodyear and Markauskaite states that in order for the field of learning design to move forward, there is a need to take a step back and reassess assertions made. The article presents a synthesis of findings from two research projects focused on teachers’ design thinking. The authors argue that whilst much of the current research and development work in the field of learning design has been focused on well‐intentioned initiatives aimed to help teachers design technology‐enhanced learning activities, this work has been largely based on untested assumptions about how teachers engage in the design process. The article presents two studies: one that examined the design process undertaken by school teachers as they designed online learning activities and one that focused on an in‐depth examination of university teachers’ design thinking when teaching a postgraduate course. A significant finding from this research is that a teacher’s pedagogical beliefs may differ (and even be contrasting) in different teaching contexts. The authors thus challenge the view that pedagogical beliefs of educators are coherent and stable and contend that design decisions are heavily influenced by context. The article concludes by discussing some practical implications of this finding in terms of developing design aids.
Bennett, Thomas, Agostinho, Lockyer, Jones and Harper present an article with a similar viewpoint to that of Goodyear et al. Bennett et al. argue that whilst many initiatives to improve teaching and learning in the higher education sector have been focused on sharing and encouraging reuse of ‘good design practice’, there is little known about the actual context in which university teachers design. Thus, there is little understanding about to what extent university teachers are able to make design decisions in their teaching and what influences those decisions. The article reports a study that explored the design context of 30 Australian university teachers. The study found that the Australian university teaching context permits teachers to exercise a relatively high degree of choice in terms of designing. The authors contend that these findings mandate the investigation of how learning design support tools could be used by university teachers.
The article by Kearney reports the development of a learning design for learner‐generated digital storytelling. Drawing on two research studies, Kearney explains how the learning design evolved and presents the learning design using a particular learning design representation. The issues faced when documenting the learning design are discussed. This article is an example of representing practice using a learning design representation.
The last article presents another perspective of learning design by reporting on recent work conducted on the technical learning design specification IMS Learning Design (IMS‐LD). Miao and Hoppe explore how IMS‐LD, a computer‐readable learning design language developed primarily for formalised and pre‐planned computer‐assisted learning, could be used within a work context to describe work‐based learning (WBL) activities. The authors investigate whether the specification caters for the relatively informal WBL approach. The findings suggest that some refinements to the specification may be required. This article will appeal to those who have expertise with the technical aspects of IMS‐LD. The technical discussion raised mixed reactions amongst the reviewers. The article was included because it was felt timely that wider discussion of some controversial technical points would be useful in order to advance the work in learning design.
These articles underwent a comprehensive review process, each being reviewed by four reviewers from an international list of experts in the learning design field. We acknowledge the review team below and thank our colleagues for their assistance in the production of this special issue.
This field of inquiry that started a little over 10 years ago has grown in complexity with the research highlighting that there are no all‐encompassing easy solutions. The challenge of representing teaching practice in meaningful ways for teachers to understand, discuss and share ideas remains. In order to address this challenge, more empirical research is needed to better understand teachers’ design practices so that closer alignment between teachers’ needs and learning design initiatives can be achieved. The future of learning design may paradoxically depend on stepping back to examine and reflect upon some assumptions.
Overall, there appears to be agreement that learning design is a complex process and future research needs to include more universal solutions to the problem of learning design representation, close investigation of the design process that teachers implement, and how this process can be supported by effective tools and procedures. This special issue is a timely contribution to stimulate discussion about these issues to guide the future direction of research and development to enable the advancement of the learning design field.
Review team: Shirley Agostinho, Sue Bennett, Luca Botturi, Michael Derntl, Yannis Dimitriadis, Isobel Falconer, Peter Goodyear, Dai Griffiths, Barry Harper, Davinia Hernández‐Leo, Yael Kali, Matthew Kearney, Rob Koper, Alison Littlejohn, Lori Lockyer, Patrick McAndrew, Elizabeth Masterman, Ron Oliver, Bill Olivier, Yongwu Miao and Peter Sloep.