Learning Design for an age where old norms are fading away
“AI will revolutionise [insert sector here]” encapsulates the kind of rhetoric we've been hearing for a while. I'm not disputing AI's significant impact on higher education for a second. However, amidst the AI maelstrom, it's very easy to overlook other factors influencing higher education change.
Lifelong learning is one such transformational factor. Whilst it’s often defined as educational opportunities throughout one's life, I view it as broader, encompassing reaching a wider audience with more varied formats.
Momentum behind lifelong learning stems from various factors, including predictions of radical job market changes due to technology, resulting in a more acute need to upskill and re-skill regularly.
Momentum is also driven by a heightened sense of the inadequacies of the current higher education model. Stanford University's Open Loop project described the traditional model as "4 years of undergraduate education at the start of adulthood."
For some people this model is simultaneously becoming more luxurious, unaffordable, inflexible, outdated and irrelevant. While opinions may vary, it’s clear that questions are growing around how effectively the current model works for people, their needs and changing realities.
The extent to which higher education shifts towards a paradigm that’s more lifelong than front-loaded is debatable. However, the concept of a higher education model that better supports a continuum of learning opportunities across peoples’ lifetimes is a compelling one.
To quote from Stanford’s Open Loop project again, the key provocation for the sector is this:
“If learning is continuous, why isn’t a person’s relationship with the university also continuous?
Lifelong learning developments in UK higher education
In the UK, the upcoming change to the funding system in the form of the lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) signals a growing emphasis on lifelong learning. Despite the LLE’s flaws it will go some way to creating conditions for a lifelong learning paradigm.
Other developments in UK higher education are also paving the way for different means of engagement, with the introduction of microcredentials and more flexible programme pathways being notable examples.
Additionally, there are “under the hood” efforts that are underway in universities to adapt technical infrastructure to support more varied formats and types of engagement. This major challenge, often overlooked, is crucial for this type of transition.
Another challenge in shifting from front-loaded to lifelong learning is our approach to designing learning experiences. This coupled with technological advancements, will require a new perspective on the work of learning design.
Three key changes needed for learning design in a lifelong learning paradigm
I've been reflecting on learning design for a changing higher education reality, and earlier this year, I developed an organisation maturity model for learning design.
The model focuses on how the work and discipline of learning design can flourish and have a greater impact in education institutions. The core of my model revolves around three key aspects: levels of collaboration, design representation, and evidence and underpinning of decisions and actions. Although I’m going to frame these slightly differently, these elements are crucial to addressing the unique challenges of learning design within a lifelong learning framework.
Those challenges are substantial, as learning design will need to consider how to cater to a broader audience, encompassing diverse ages, educational backgrounds, and experience. The work will also cover a wider variety of educational experiences, and more flexible and varied educational pathways.
To effectively support a shift towards a lifelong learning paradigm, I believe there are three key changes needed in learning design.
1. A more multi-disciplinary approach to learning design
Designing learning experiences has become increasingly complex, especially given how digital and online technologies have permeated courses in recent decades. This has layered complexity onto the design of educational experiences, and an expanding body of knowledge and research about learning and student experiences has added to that.
Learning design which I define as “the planning, preparation, thought-work and formation of a blueprint of the teaching & learning experience prior to running an educational experience” has widened in scope due to factors like technological advances and a deeper understanding of learning processes.
The traditional notion of compressing this work into the responsibilities of one individual, often primarily qualified and motivated by subject expertise, feels increasingly sub-optimal and unsustainable. Particularly considering the other types of responsibilities they typically have.
Moving forward I think we’ll need a multidisciplinary approach to designing learning experiences and journeys. This will involve leveraging the knowledge and expertise wrapped up in various professional specialisations.
For example, we’re going to need to better integrate specialist knowledge in digital technology, user experience and digital accessibility.
With so much of our educational experiences being conducted via digital technologies, the orthodoxy of a largely autonomous individual choreographing the whole learning & teaching experience is being increasingly challenged.
There is still plenty of evidence of significant friction and frustration being experienced by students, often due to decisions that impede the usability of digital technologies.
In respect to digital accessibility and access, whilst the higher education sector has made progress, I’m yet to meet someone working in a HEI who is totally confident they are meeting the highest accessibility standards across the board. From a personal point of view, I still consistently see what I’d describe as a lack of knowledge and compliance around digital accessibility.
The areas of user experience and accessibility are not domains that we’re bereft of knowledge and expertise, but current approaches to designing learning experience rarely allow complementary expertise and knowledge to play a role.
These inadequacies will become even more exposed in a lifelong learning paradigm where there’s a wider audience, with even more varied needs and expectations.
Going forward institutions will need to more deeply consider the breadth of knowledge and type of expertise needed in order to design effective educational experiences and journeys. Gone are the days in which you can afford to simply rely on subject matter expertise if you want to create the very best learning experiences.
The most compelling way I have seen this multidisciplinary approach described was by Western Governer’s University in the US, who say this about their model.
“Typical brick-and-mortar universities have a single faculty member fulfilling many roles from course instructor to coach, to psychometrician and evaluator, and sometimes even counselor, much like healthcare offers up a general practitioner who is expected to know something about everything. But the reality is, when a person needs superior specialized skills, they seldom rely on their general practitioner. They call a specialist. And a specialist model is what WGU employs.”
Undoubtedly, any move towards a multidisciplinary approach is going to require creativity and innovation, particularly within the constraints and scale we work within in higher education. This won’t simply be about increasing headcount and recruiting to new roles, but also reconfiguring, upskilling and better understanding and drawing upon the existing knowledge and expertise within.
2. Creating more sophisticated design methods
The second area of change is in respect to the methods we use to design learning experiences. I remember looking at a workload allocation model a few years ago and observing the indicative activities listed for what would fall within my earlier definition of learning design.
It was striking that these activities focussed on developing a functional suite of documentation or materials in a way that felt both a reductive and out of date way of thinking about the planning and preparation of learning experiences.
Whilst this fortunately isn’t the complete picture of the work that falls under the banner of learning design. The more sophisticated journeys in and across and through courses envisaged by a lifelong learning paradigm will need us to step up in terms of the design methods and design representation we use.
The design methods we use aren’t going to be best served by a prose-based documentation approach. Cohesion is going to be key and given this is already a problem in higher education in terms of cohesion of modules and assessment across multi-year programmes, there is work to be done.
Learning design as a field is not especially blessed with an array of learning design methods and design representation formats. A cursory search of user experience design methods highlights a range of approaches. But for learning design, approaches are scarce and some of the widely adopted methods in UK HE are somewhat one-dimensional.
So I think we’re going to have to create new design methods and a suite of design representation formats to meet the challenge of growing a variety of formats, growing flexibility and variability in the journey through education.
This is an exciting opportunity for the learning design field to grow and an opportunity to further professionalise a field that is hampered somewhat by the inconsistency and variability in skills and professional competence.
3. Developing a more informed approach
The final area of focus is the need to be much more informed when it comes to learning design.
If institutions are going to broaden the audience they reach in different ways then being as informed as possible through a range of insights is going to be critical to ensuring learning experiences are as effective as possible.
The experience of the pandemic highlighted a lack of knowledge around online learning and teaching methods, and more fundamentally a gap in how well informed people are about different learning & teaching formats outside of the traditional ones.
Given that online education has commonly been directed towards learners that are a bit older, are non-traditional students or an international audience. We might also speculate as to how informed & equipped people are around learning & teaching for a wider and more varied demographic of learners.
The knowledge base around designing learning experiences for different types of learners via different formats such as online education isn’t exactly bare, so this points to a bigger issue.
Similarly, the extent to which educators and learning designers themselves are bringing to bear the breadth of insight and understanding we have about learning itself is debatable.
We can legitimately ask, how much is existing and growing knowledge around key ideas in learning like motivation, self-efficacy, metacognition, feedback, prior knowledge, memory and attention being brought to bear when we’re designing learning experiences?
….and how much more necessary or important or valuable is this going to be when serving a wider audience on more sophisticated and punctuated pathways through education?
Having a good grasp of some of these meta-level ideas in learning is important for learning design full stop. But this is also a key component of the disciplinary expertise that learning designers should be bringing to a multidisciplinary approach. It will, however, take on added importance in any move towards a lifelong learning paradigm.
As well as research on learning itself, the extent to which we’re designing-in mechanisms to gain robust insights to live student learning experiences, and then using these insights retrospectively to drive continuous improvement and enhancement is debatable.
Whether driven through wider changes or not, learning design work could be much more informed and arguably will need to be going forward.
Learning design to meet present and future challenges
I began by mentioning AI and many are exploring its use in ways that might enhance learning and learning design. Although I've not mentioned AI explicitly here, exploring ways in which it can be applied to the challenges I’ve outlined is a productive avenue. I expect AI to become a significant part of the work of learning design, but how we harness it to improve and not simply outsource will be key.
Higher education is evolving at its own pace, but a decent proportion of change is being driven by an increasing sense of the importance of lifelong learning. Whether we will see a more fundamental change of higher education model in the future or simply incremental changes that involve modularisation of degrees and more microcredentials largely serving a similar audience remains to be seen.
But regardless, the challenge of designing effective learning experiences will remain and the changes I’ve outlined are things that institutions should mull over if they want to develop the work of learning design to meet present and future challenges.
