Planning and sharing learning designs: cross-cultural use of a learning design support tool

Abstract

In order to facilitate their teaching design, more teachers are beginning to engage in collective efforts, with some Chinese teachers also now sharing their resources online to plan their teaching. The learning design support tool described here (the Learning Designer), resulting from an interdisciplinary research project in the UK, provides a new form of collaboration between teachers. This paper tests the value of the tool for cross-cultural sharing of learning designs. It documents the process of a Chinese teacher who tries to represent and share his language teaching planning by using this innovative web-based prototype. The paper reflects on the issues that arise from this cross-cultural study, and the implications for the future of pedagogical innovation.

Keywords:

• learning design
• course design
• Learning Designer
• course planning
• pedagogical innovation
• pedagogical patterns collector

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank three colleagues of Shanghai Open University who contributed to the paper: Ms Song Jie, Ms Sheng Cuiping and Ms Liu Ying.

Notes

The Building Community Knowledge website is at: https://buildingcommunityknowledge.wordpress.com/ with access to further information about the project.

1. http://learningdesigner.org/index.php. It is free to use online, and open to all.

2. Available online at http://web.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/PPC/live/ODC.html

3. Available online at https://www.coursesites.com/webapps/Bb-sites-course-creation-BBLEARN/courseHomepage.htmlx?course_id=_296189_1

Additional information

Funding

The research for development of the Learning Designer was funded by the EPSRC/ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme (Technology Enhanced Learning [RES-139-25-0406]). The project reported here was a collaboration between the Institute of Education (Dr Dejan Ljubojevic developed the original Pedagogical Patterns Collector software; Dionisis Dimakopoulos developed the Learning Designer software on which it was based), Birkbeck, University of Oxford, The London School of Economics, The Royal Veterinary College, and London Metropolitan University. The paper is part of research conducted by the author while he worked as a visiting academic in the Institute of Education, University of London, funded by Shanghai Open University and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.