Designing for the learner’s context is the fourth of ten Principles of Learning Design. Situated learning has proven to be a highly enduring form of learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). This means that, as learning designers, we should aim to place as much of the learning as possible in a real-world context that our students are currently experiencing (Seely-Brown et al., 1989). If a course is explicitly a classroom, foundational, knowledge-accumulation exercise, then that is the context in which the learning is taking place, and it is reasonable to design courseware and interactions with that in mind. However, if the course outcomes do more than simply serve up knowledge for consumption, and if there is any need on the part of the student to enact their learning, then the learning context may be different. Students’ ability to learn effectively requires an acknowledgement of situational motivation (Törmänen et al., 2025). Here are three sub-principles that serve to unpack these points.
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