Learning designers: New fad or new future?
In one sense designing learning experiences isn’t anything new, it’s what teachers and educators have been doing for years, it’s what instructional designers have been doing for years. But one of the pandemic-driven changes has been the opening up of learning designer roles in universities and a range of different education and training providers.
Just like online education in general, the learning designer role was very niche and would most typically be found in areas focussed exclusively on online, blended or distance education.
Arguably, if you wanted to be a learning designer in higher education before the pandemic, one of the best avenues would be to work for an Online Programme Manager (OPM) partnered with a university to deliver their online programmes. The opportunities elsewhere were limited by the small number of universities taking online education seriously.
Learning designers and the expansion of online learning
This, though, seems to be changing, as online education is now being taken more seriously in the UK and there are a number of UK universities that are either expanding already established online education operations or are setting them up from scratch.
It’s worth saying at this point, this is significant.
A university investing strategically in online education pre-pandemic was very much the exception rather than the rule and the shift is especially striking for those of us who have been in the space for years extolling the virtues of online education.
In this context, the learning designer role seems to have become a very valuable commodity. Now is a good time to be a learning designer - in fact what I hear is that there is not enough quality supply to meet the demand in the UK, which will have consequences for recruitment and the support that might be needed to step into those shoes.
Beyond role-filling: Integrating learning designers into HE
Whilst I think this is a positive move, there is also a certain element of - “now we need one of those” - and this mentality is particularly myopic.
The value of a learning designer role is not as another role type to plug into the academic, educational development/learning technologist space, but rather to work on a portfolio of specific programmes and courses. The learning designer role at its best is one that works as a close partner to teaching staff and teams in designing experiences and a context for learning to result.
Having one, won’t as if by magic bring that about - it will require deliberateness and most significantly culture change.
The culture in many education providers isn’t geared towards close partnership working between educators/subject matter experts (SMEs) and learning designers. In fact for many the idea that you would work in partnership to design, plan and envisage a learning experience is on a spectrum from utterly alien to a gross intrusion.
At a more general level this needs to change. A couple of reasons for this are the increasing adoption of modes of teaching that entail more complexity and call for greater design.
The second is that it is a great challenge to be an expert in one’s subject and also be an expert in teaching that subject. The sheer dearth of knowledge of the advances made in the learning sciences over the last 30 years is an example of how it’s difficult keep up with what we know about learning, teaching and at the same time one’s subject. Learning designers are a bridge to this significant gap.
This is not meant as a slight to educators/SMEs but an acknowledgement of the complexity and difficulty of being proficient in all those things. Whilst I know educators who remarkably wear all those hats with distinction, this is rare and unrealistic to expect of everyone, particularly with the many other hats people are expected to wear.
Learning designers as more than a trend
So learning designers can play a key role in meeting the aspirations of any education provider looking to get serious about online, blended and distance education. But just like the pursuit of these things in general, they won’t be successfully achieved without moving away from the old ways of doing things in education.
I fear that there will be many dissatisfied learning designers and some significant false starts in education providers making a pandemic-driven move to new modes of teaching and study. Much of this will be due to new aspirations being sunk by the weight of old cultures.
An excellent learning designer will be a key role in the future of many education providers, but to paraphrase what a colleague of mine said years ago, the challenge of switching to online teaching and learning is organisational change which means that everyone involved has to do their job in a slightly different way.
If providers fall to address this, a learning designer will be a mere adornment to show you were on trend, rather than a key guide in moving in a different direction.
