Thinking differently about designThe OU Learning Design Initiative

Gráinne ConoleThe Open University, UK

Focus for today•Learning design - OULDI

▫An evidence base – understanding, reflecting▫Compendium - creating, designing, reflecting▫Cloudworks - finding, communicating,

reflecting▫Pedagogy schema - designing, reflecting

•Open Educational Resources – OLnet ▫An evidence base for OER - finding, creating,

designing, communicating, reflecting ▫Fellowship schema▫Research projects▫Events and activities

Discussion•What do you want out of this workshop?

▫To learn about Compendiumld – how can we use it in the classroom

▫Ideas▫How to use Compendiumld and better ways of

designing activities▫How to integrate learning designing with training

in general without frightening the teachers!▫Some of the difficulties and how go about

addressing them!!!

Outcomes

•Overview of OU Learning Design Initiative (OULDI) and Olnet

•Some hands-on exploration of tools and ideas

•A better understanding of the issues and challenges of learning design

•Discussion of and refection on relevance to your context

Paradoxes & conundrums

Array of technologies

Not fully exploited

Open Educational Resources

Little evidence of reuse

New technologies offer new pedagogical opportunities

Potential for reuse with Open Educational Resources

Solution?

A means of describing and representing learning activities

A means of sharing learning activities

Learning Design: Designing for learning

Guiding the design of learning activities

New ways of thinking and innovating

To enhance the learner experience

Representing pedagogy

Guiding design Sharing ideas

Empirical evidence base

Empirical evidence

Tool development

CloudworksCompendiumLD

Resources and events

Cloudfests

Workshops

Design challenges

Summits

Schema

Andrew Brasher, Paul Clark, Simon Cross, Juliette Culver, Martin Weller, Perry Williams

Vision of enhancing the learner experience through pedagogically informed, innovative use of technologies

Bridge between pedagogy & technology

Capture & represent designs

Scaffold the design process

Promote sharing and reuse

Facets of OULDI work

•Evidence base: Understanding the design process

•Collaboration: Structured events for fostering shared meaning and collaboration

•Representation: Tools to support different forms of representation

•Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to foster debate and sharing

•Reification: Abstraction and guidance through schema for thinking differently

ContextTeacher design

Assessment

Learning outcomes

Student experience

Tasks

Learning activities

Aspects of design

Support

Assessment

Learning outcomes

Tasks

Facets of OULDI work

•Evidence base: Understanding the design process

•Collaboration: Structured events for fostering shared meaning and collaboration

•Representation: Tools to support different forms of representation

•Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to foster debate and sharing

•Reification: Abstraction and guidance through schema for thinking differently

Evidence base: gathering data

Testing the tools!

Feedback, feedback, feedback

Expert brainstorming

Development of support resources

Building an understanding about design

Case studies

Interviews

In-depth course evaluation

Futures visioning workshops

Workshops

Use of tools

Design process

Design lifecycle

Tools development

Trialling & evaluation

Case studiesUse of tools in context

Ideas generation & support mechanisms

Pedagogical approaches

Representation

Barriers & enablers

Interviews

Process Representation

Support

Barriers

Evaluation

Tacit natureThe ‘big’ idea

Shared vision

Existing processes

Link to assessment

Constraints

Interactive design

Serendipity

‘From the heart’

Expertise & time

In-depth evaluation

Design cycleGranularity of designs

Team dynamics Barriers & enablers

Multi-faceted

Design lifecycle

Vision

Gather

Evaluate

Run

Assemble

Adapt

Course conception

Course delivery

Course refinement

Learning activity

Block Course

I was building a sense of what the new course might be … we must remember to do x, or a url of relevance

One of the difficulties is mapping the whole process I have tried to approach course design using a holistic approach

List of words clustered into blocks, arrows...can you have clusters link to TMAs [Assignments]

Start from assessment strategies and learning outcomes and get an alignment

[Scrapbook] It’s in words, not diagrams a dumping ground for thoughts – [to] capture thoughts

I tend to sit and doodle a map will draw the logic and flow of the course on paper and then go to compendium. Then the problem is sharing it

Interview snapshots

Holistic & atomistic

Mapping & connections

Scrapbooks &doodle maps

Facets of OULDI work

•Evidence base: Understanding the design process

•Collaboration: Structured events for fostering shared meaning and collaboration

•Representation: Tools to support different forms of representation

•Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to foster debate and sharing

•Reification: Abstraction and guidance through schema for thinking differently

Collaboration: events

Design challenge

Cloudfests

Design summits Blurring real & virtual

Strategies for design

•How do you go about designing courses?•Where do you get inspiration from?•What tools, support, etc do you use?•How do you represent your designs?•How (or do) you share your ideas with

others?•How do you evaluate yours designs/know

they are any good?

Strategies for design•Think about learning objectives•Jot down ideas, extract info create an

outline and then attached activities, put all together

•First go through the content we want to teach, then after set the goals we want to achieve, then think what learning objects we want to use or what tools we want to use, then try it in the class, but also important to assess and get feedback and reflect and improve

Design strategiesDesign process creative, messy, iterative

Sharing and reuse difficult, but valuable

Serendipitous routes to support

Every teacher does it differently

Different aspects to design - focus and level of granularity

No one perfect design tool or approach

Different aspects – resources, tools, outcomes, support, etc.

Facets of OULDI work

•Evidence base: Understanding the design process

•Collaboration: Structured events for fostering shared meaning and collaboration

•Representation: Tools to support different forms of representation

•Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to foster debate and sharing

•Reification: Abstraction and guidance through schema for thinking differently

Representation: CompendiumLD

CompendiumLD

Core icon set

Design icon set

Building a design

Assignment

Outcome

Stop

Task

Resource

Tool

Role

Activity

Using a wiki to analyse a pop song for English language learning

In-situ help

Customised search

Time aggregation

Timings

Support templates

Activity

•Create a design in CompendiumLD•Either choose a new activity you are

planning or map an existing activity•Work in pairs and discuss your designs as

you are working

Facets of OULDI work

•Evidence base: Understanding the design process

•Collaboration: Structured events for fostering shared meaning and collaboration

•Representation: Tools to support different forms of representation

•Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to foster debate and sharing

•Reification: Abstraction and guidance through schema for thinking differently

Connection: Cloudworks

Many repositories of good practice, but how do you develop the community???

RSS feeds Follow and be followed

Friends

Embed

Aggregate

Share

Comment

Playlists

APIs

Cloudworks

Vision & principles

• Connect people with similar interests

• Showcase work• Provide a place for

different communities• Encourage sharing• Low barrier to entry

• People-orientated

• Open site, open content

• Target particular communities

• The site acting as a conduit

Enable people to find, share & discuss learning & teaching ideas

Cloudfests

If you notice things that are abstract, you can say: Oh, and how did that work? or give me an example, I did one like this! ... It didn’t worry me that it was abstract. What worried me was: how the hell does he make that work in an OU teaching context!

The ones that started to catch my interest were where I could quite quickly get a sense of a device or an approach... Within two or three sentences, I kind of grasped what it was that they had done and it caught my imagination.

It would be very interesting to have the person who’s written the piece of teaching material, see what the people at the coal face are doing with it!

It would be really good to have some sort of perspective from the people who actually make things, because they’ve got a lot of experience about (what) does and doesn’t work.

Clouds: Learning and teaching ideasDesign or case studiesTools or resourcesQuestions or problems

Cloudscapes:ConferencesWorkshopsCourse teamStudent cohortResearch themeProject

Facets of OULDI work

•Evidence base: Understanding the design process

•Collaboration: Structured events for fostering shared meaning and collaboration

•Representation: Tools to support different forms of representation

•Connection: Harnessing web 2.0 practices to foster debate and sharing

•Reification: Abstraction and guidance through schema for thinking differently

LIST of LEARNING PRINCIPLES

Thinking & reflection

Conversation & interaction

Experience & activity

Evidence & demonstration

Reification: SchemaThinking & reflection

Conversation & interaction

Experience & activity

Evidence& demonstration

Schema

Guiding design

MappingDeconstructing

Validating

Blog as reflective diary

Individual

Social

Passive Active

Information

Experience

Blog collective class resource

Mapping activities to pedagogy

Conole, G., Dyke, M., Oliver, M. and Seale, J. (2004). 'Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design', Computers and Education, 43 (1-2), 17-33

Activity•Locate the following on the framework

▫Web search: students search the web and collate resources against a given set of criteria

▫Drill and practice: students work through a set of resource and then complete a formative self-assessment

▫Debate: for and against debate, students choose a side, post their views and read other postings

▫Portfolio: students gather evidence against learning outcomes into a portfolio

Thinking &reflection

Communication & interaction

Experience & activity

Evidence &demonstration

Four inter-connected facets of learning

Dyke, Conole et al., (2007)

Thinking about learning

Principles Thinking & reflection

Experience & activity

Conversation & interaction

Evidence & demonstratio

n

Reflect on experience and show

understanding

Frequent interactive exercises & feedback

Provides support for

independent learning

Supports collaborative

activities

Mapping learning activities against goals

Aggregation of learning activities

Conole, 2008, New Schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies, Ariadne article

Microlearner

Profile

2Learner

CloudworksWrites to and

imports goals, resources, stream

Create goals, tasks

Pull in and publish relevant content

Pull in and publish relevant courses/designs

Publicise study and learning story

Making connections

SocialLearn

OpenLearn SociaLearn

Different set of principles

Different mapping to pedagogies

A DNA print of designs

8LEM Hybrid model•8LEM flashcards - focusing on the student activities•8 student activities and a set of verbs for what teacher and student does for each activity• View the LEM

demonstration http://cetl.ulster.ac.uk/elearning/index.php?page=8LEM-8

• Create a design using the mapping grid http://cetl.ulster.ac.uk/elearning/documents/grid.pdf

The 8LEM Hybrid model

OER cycle Specialised toolResource

Generic tool

Schema

Select

Design

Use

Evaluate

VLE

Class aggregated resources

Analysis tools Student survey

Openlearn

Cloudworks

Google

CompendiumLDTopic OER

Mapping schema

Researcher

User

OER cycle

Specialised toolResource

Generic tool

Schema

OLnet: towards a network...

People/networks

Tools, methods, approaches

Meta-analysis/synthesis

Designs, evaluations, case studies

Sites

•OULDI▫http://ouldi.open.ac.uk

•Cloudworks▫http://cloudworks.ac.uk

•CompendiumLD▫http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk

•Olnet▫http://olnet.org

References• Conole, G., De Laat, M., Dillon, T. and Darby, J. (2008),

‘Disruptive technologies’, ‘pedagogical innovation’: What’s new? Findings from an in-depth study of students’ use and perception of technology’, Computers and Education, Volume 50, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 511-524.

• Conole, G. (in press), Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education in M. Lee and C. McLouglin (forthcoming), Web 2.0-based e-learning: applying social informatics for tertiary teaching, ICI Global: Hersey, PA

• Conole, G., Culver, J., Well, M., Williams, P., Cross, S., Clark, P. and Brasher, A. (2008), Cloudworks: social networking for learning design, Ascilite Conference, 30th Nov – 3rd Dec 2008, Melbourne.

References• Conole, G. and McAndrew, P. (accepted), A new approach

to supporting the design and use of OER: Harnessing the power of web 2.0, M. Edner and M. Schiefner (eds), Looking toward the future of technology enhanced education: ubiquitous learning and the digital nature.

• Conole, G., Brasher, A., Cross, S., Weller, M., Clark, P. and White, J. (2008), Visualising learning design to foster and support good practice and creativity, Educational Media International, Volume 54, Issue 3, 177-194.

• Conole, G. (2008), New schema for mapping pedagogies and technologies, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/

• Conole, G. (in press), Research methodological issues with researching the learner voice, in Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: issues and challenges, L. T. W. Hin and R. Subramaniam (Eds), IGI Global: Hershey, PA