I am passionate about learning design (or instructional design). I strongly believe that the student and faculty experience in any course or programme of study depends in large part on the quality of the designed experience. These pages share my practice, over 30 years, as an educational developer and course designer.
The dominant learning philosophy in the occidental world, notably in the tertiary sector, is social constructivism. There have been other major movements, such as behaviourism, but constructivism, in its various forms, now informs the vast majority of programme and course design, although many teaching faculty take this for granted and tend not to visit its foundational underpinning.
Principles
Then there are Principles. Before we start designing a programme, we may want to begin with a grounded sense of who our students are in our institutional context. Do we have Graduate Profiles at an institutional or discipline level? I have developed 10 Principles of Learning Design. These should serve as a starting point. You may contest them, or add some.
Framework
When the entire design team understands the broad institutional context, they can establish a design framework. ADDIE is popular (particularly in commercial eLearning), but I find it too ill-defined, so I have developed the 8 Stage Learning Design Framework, or 8SLDF for short.
Models
Within the 8SLDF, there comes a point when designers want to drill down into what a syllabus will look like. With formal tertiary contexts in mind, I propose adopting the 9S Model. It covers everything that happens in Stage 6 (Learning and Teaching activities) of the 8SLDF.
An alternative learning design model, the Student-Owned Learning-Engagement Model (SOLE), was developed for less time-constrained learning. Aimed principally at independent learners, ensuring a balance of learning activities is possible with minimal supervision
Patterns
Designing individual learning and teaching activities is the ‘bread-and-butter’ for most faculty. Depending on their learning experiences, training, self-reflective capabilities, and personalities, the products of these activities will vary enormously. To assist, there are patterns that can be used to develop specific skills and abilities in the students, transferable between disciplines or subject contexts. This is where the DiAL-e comes in. It is a series of templates for teaching activities that use different media artefacts. DiAL-e stands for Digital Artefacts for Learner Engagement.