The ability to create engaging learning experiences is key to the effective delivery of education and the development of lifelong learners. Globally, we are seeing the growth of learning design practices, which are influencing and enhancing traditional teaching and education practices. Yet adoption is hampered by the lack of a system of design practices, language and shared approaches. Is there space for more open systems and practices to help share experiences and practices? Are there ways that we can create bespoke experiences that suit specific learners, locations and situations rather than embrace the restrictions of a templated approach? This presentation will introduce an approach based on the concepts of ‘learning patterns’ that sets the groundwork for an open approach to creating a learning design system that can be adopted across sectors, languages, technologies and systems. While still very much in development, this system has already been used in South America and Europe. It has the potential to form a foundation for open practices around learning experience design.
Laurillard (2002, 2012) introduced a set of learning types in her work around a Conversational Framework. Using this formed the basis for our system, and the initial work was on converting the types of learning to adjectives and expanding some of the ideas and explanations to apply more broadly. This process also led us to move away from being framed around the teacher's conversation to a model that was focused on the learner and their actions. Through this process, the team developed a set of seven Learning Types: Assimilative, Investigative, Formative, Discursive, Productive, Evaluative and Social.
The Learning Types help define the overall learning experience, but they become less useful as you begin to develop individual lessons and activities. A missing piece was required to aid the development of a sequence of learning, so the idea of 'Learning Patterns' was introduced. Based on the concept of a Pattern Language (Alexander, 1977), Learning Patterns are a reusable scaffold to aid the design of a learning experience. They provide a superstructure or way of thinking that can be reused and recombined to suit different contexts and topics. The Patterns developed (Klapdor, 2022) act like Lego, simple shapes that fit together to create unique student experiences. Their usefulness comes from the fact that sequences can be adapted to suit the lesson's purpose and scaffolding provided to help author that aspect of the course.
This system has been used across several programs at the University of Adelaide and in various other institutions to help support their learning design efforts. This presentation aims to introduce these concepts and test the appetite for such a system on a more global scale by going open and developing shared resources and practices across a broader community.
Included in
[Session 6C]: Repositories, Pedagogy, Practice and Policy in OEReferencesAlexander, Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language : towns, buildings, construction. Oxford University Press. Klapdor, T. (2022) Learning Patterns Library, retrieved from https://learning-patterns.com/ July 2023 Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies (2nd ed.). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. London: Routledge.
Author Keywordslearning design, design system, design for learning
