Learning design workshop notes

Learning Design Workshop
These notes and accompanying Powerpoint slide deck were created for the Learning Design
workshops run with third sector organisations, unions, universities and colleges from 2014 to 2017
as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project; the initial workshop
design was developed by Ronald Macintyre and Pete Cannell and refined through successive
iterations on the basis of feedback from workshop participants.
The workshop was constructed to enable organisations to think through the issues involved in
creating a new openly licensed course. It can also be adapted to help with the process of
designing new practice-based initiatives. The workshop design draws on ideas from design
thinking and participatory design ( see the report by Ronald in the OEPS collection – ‘Open
Educational Practices in Design Production and Use). It aims to provide a framework within which
assumptions and motivation can be shared and made explicit, and where student needs and
context is prioritised. In the process educational practice (pedagogy) is foregrounded. Technology
is a means to an end.
Background reading
There are a host of useful background resources in the OEPS collection including a briefing note on
‘Writing a free open online course’. You may want to read or review the second section of the
short course ‘How to make an open online course’ which concentrates on planning.
About the workshop
Ideally the Learning Design workshop should involve as many of the people who will be involved in
the development of the course as possible. Involve potential ‘students’ if you can. Our experience
suggests that while workshop participants are committed to the idea of producing a learning
resource they may have a very wide range of ideas of what this means and also a diversity of
experience to share.
In the course of the workshop discussion it’s worth clarifying what participants have in mind when
they talk about a free, openly licensed course. They may have different models and approaches in
mind. As the OEPS team we had in mind a student centred and interactive approach with lots of
opportunities for activity and reflection. Often others in the workshop would have had experience
of more tick-box or didactic approaches, which might be mediated by a face-to-face tutor.
By the end of the workshop you should have teased out an in depth picture of who the ‘students’
are; what are their characteristics – educational background – learning needs – physical location –
individual or in groups – prior experience – time and opportunities for study - access to technology
– challenges and barriers and so on. On the basis of this ‘rich picture’ of the potential audience it’s
then possible to make better informed decisions about what kind of course, what kind of support
it needs to incorporate, whether it’s necessary or desirable to refine the target audience to some
subset of the envisaged audience, what kind of pedagogical approach is appropriate, what are the
learning outcomes for the course and what kind of assessment is appropriate?

1
The time spent on these issues is invaluable. You may find that a three-hour workshop suffices –
on occasion, however, it can be useful to meet again after the group has had time to reflect. At
the end of this process you will want to log the decisions you’ve made.
Note that the learning process starts with the students and their needs and then considers how
those needs can be met, the technology is important but it’s the last thing to talk about and the
student learning focus should drive the decisions you make.
Notes to accompany the slides
Throughout the OEPS project we found it useful to start thinking about learning design through
this initial workshop. The slides provide a tested framework; they are openly licensed as CC BY 4.0
so you can adapt and modify them for your own context.
Slide 2: Session outline – this provides a framework that you can adapt
Slides 3 – 5 provide some information on OEPS and definitions of OER and OEP – you may want to
replace the latter with your own take on these two central concepts
Slide 6: Hands up – we always found it useful to pause for questions and discussion at this point -
there may well be a mix of knowledge of open education among the participants – so for example
it may be the first time that some participants have thought about open licensing and what that
can mean in terms of use and reuse. All these questions won’t be resolved at this point you may
need to revisit them later.
Slide 7: Today’s purpose – self explanatory!
Slide 8: Defining the problem – what is the problem or issue that you are trying to tackle – how is
it connected to multiple causes? We found arrow diagrams a useful way of illustrating multiple
causes and connections – you may prefer other equivalent approaches.
Slides 9 -11 provide some background to the exercises that form the core of the workshop.
Slide 12: Exercise 1. You’ll need flip chart paper and pens. There are two stages in the context of
your ‘problem’ and purpose think about the attributes of the ‘ideal’ learner. Statements like ‘my
ideal learner would be able to …’ or ‘my ideal learner would know how to …’ may be appropriate.
We found drawing a rich picture as a visual representation of the ideal learner worked well –
however, not everyone is comfortable with this approach and bulleted lists or other forms of
record can be just as effective. Once the group is happy with their definition of the ideal the next
stage is to consider what the actual learner is like. Again record you thoughts – this process helps
you think about your audience – who are the learners – what defines them – what constraints will
they be under – what experience do they bring. You may at this point decide that your original
purpose defined to large and disparate a target audience and that it would be better to aim at a
more tightly defined group.
Slide 13: Exercise 2 provides a space to review what you’ve recorded about your potential learners
and perhaps to log gaps in your knowledge that you may want to address. Consider in general
terms how what you know about your learners might shape the design of the course that you plan
to write – you’ll look at this in more detail in Exercise 3.

2
Slides 14 – 16 provide two alternative approaches to sketching out the learner journey.
Slides 17 -18 outline the stages of content production – at this point you need to think about who
is going to take what role, what the timeline will look like and immediate next steps.
Postscript
At the end of workshop you’ll have lots of valuable thoughts recorded on flipcharts, post-it notes
etc. It’s a good idea to use a mobile phone camera to capture all the data so that it can be
organised and saved for reference.
This work was created as part of the Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS) project
(https://oepscotland.org) and unless otherwise stated is licensed CC-BY 4.0 International license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Learning design workshop notes

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Learning design workshop notes