Are new strategies needed for learning design services to have real impact?
Photo by Karel Rakovsky
Learning design in UK higher education has been on an interesting journey in recent years. It’s grown in popularity as a term, an activity, and as a moniker for roles that support learning & teaching activity.
The term, along with the role type associated with it; namely a learning designer, is one of the newer titles on the list of learning & teaching support roles in UK higher education. It is more contemporary than titles such as education developer, academic developer and learning technologist, arguably possessing greater cachet as a result.
Ultimately, all of these roles converge on the aim of enhancing learning experiences, a perpetual goal and challenge for all UK higher education institutions (HEIs). The goal is an easy one to set, but what proves consistently difficult is how teaching & learning support capabilities are operationalised within HEIs to make a real impact.
This challenge is pertinent to learning design, and is one faced by HEIs that have recruited learning designers, changed existing roles to learning designer focussed ones, or are developing a learning design function in their education support realm.
My overall impression is that more UK HEIs have been engaging in these activities. However, it is less clear whether enhancements are being experienced as a result and the extent to which impactful strategies have been developed.
Creating a function or a service is one thing, but developing a strategy that maximises learning design’s impact is another. That’s not to say this is easy, and in HEIs, there are a range of common challenges and barriers to learning design activity. There are also numerous considerations that influence strategy formation, and ultimately a number of factors that are often outside the control of those responsible for learning design support.
The key question I have, is whether UK HEIs are devising strategies for learning design support that are having a tangible impact and, when faced with key considerations, whether there is any significant difference in the approaches HEIs are taking.
In considering that question it’s worth exploring some of the factors that present inherent challenges for learning design activity and some of the key choices faced when developing a strategy.
The shifting sands of leadership changes
One big challenge to developing a learning design support service or any kind of teaching & learning service for that matter, are leadership changes. We’re currently in a period of many national elections across the globe, and that means changing approaches, strategies and methods as one ruling party transfers power to another. This type of transition also occurs in higher education as new senior leaders, including Vice-Chancellors (VCs), Pro-Vice-Chancellors (PVCs), are periodically appointed.
Those transitions often result in the sidelining of existing priorities and strategies, sometimes merely due to their association with previous incumbents. This leads to new priorities being established and new strategies being developed.
While it's somewhat understandable for new senior leaders to want to implement their own strategies, the resulting lack of continuity and ensuing disruption pose significant challenges, especially in the realm of learning & teaching support. These shifts can unsettle and complicate the functioning of established learning design services and, in some cases, make it even more challenging for fledgling services to be established
This is a seemingly unavoidable aspect of the higher education landscape, and constitutes a largely uncontrollable and ongoing challenge for services dedicated to supporting learning & teaching.
Location, location, location
A major factor that influences the development of a service or function is where it is located within the federated architecture of HEIs. In some institutions learning & teaching support functions are centrally located, in others the function is distributed across departments, and in others there’s a combination of both approaches.
It’s been more common for these types of functions to sit centrally and that reflects the general trajectory of centralisation in recent years. From a learning design perspective, decentralisation offers the opportunity to specialise in disciplinary areas, offers greater proximity to academic staff, which can aid in building relationships, trust and fostering partnerships with teaching staff.
However, when located within departments there’s always the risk of role drift and a diluted focus on learning design, as often there’s a smaller overall unit of resource. This can lead to learning designers being drawn into a more diverse range of tasks as they emerge and priorities change.
Centralisation, too, has its challenges, notably the potential for learning & teaching support to be conflated with technology services, especially when situated near or within IT departments. On the other end of the spectrum is a more scholarly manifestation of a learning & teaching function, that creates the risk of an imbalance between the academic and the applied.
The context in which learning design support is placed or where it emanates from is a key influencing factor on what can be achieved, but it’s not just present dynamics, but past ones that can also be influential. The combination of the leadership changes I mentioned earlier, or strategy shifts, has meant that central learning & teaching functions can be particularly susceptible to rebranding and changes
I’ve lost track of what current titles are en vogue for these services but if I mentioned the words “innovation”, “futures”, “excellence”, “lab” or “success” you’d get my meaning. What’s important to note is that associations with former iterations can persist, leading to confusion and challenges in perception and expectation.
Wide or deep?
One key dilemma for learning design support strategies in HEIs is whether to adopt a broad approach or a more focused one. If you “go wide” and aim to provide a greater breadth of support across the organisation, unless you’re in the extremely rare position of having a very large team, that influences impact and approach.
Typically, where I have seen learning design services “go deep” is when they are focussed on online education and ring fenced around courses delivered online. However, the prevailing model of learning & teaching support in UK HE aims to cater to the entire federation, if I can put it like that.
In one sense this approach is understandable, you develop a service and you want that service to support the needs of the whole organisation. In the current environment, it would take a lot of nerve to adopt a more selective strategy concerning who you do and don’t support and in what way. However, I would argue that the trade-off you make when going wide is a dilution of the activity of learning design.
While I’m not saying that more momentary learning design interventions lack value, I think learning design, as both an activity and a discipline, has greater potential to achieve more substantial and positive impacts when integrated longitudinally into the process of creating new or refreshed courses.
Although, having said that, the wide or deep question isn’t simply about what’s best for learning design, it's influenced by higher-level strategic priorities, including the rollout of new curriculum frameworks. Ironically, these initiatives can be a key driver for learning design activity within institutions, but inevitably lead to a wide approach to support the desired changes across a range of courses.
Short term or long term focus?
New curriculum frameworks being rolled out touches on another dichotomy between short-term focus and long-term focus. In a way, and please bear with me on this, it reminds me a little bit of football.
In football, the days of a football manager who has great power and wields great influence over the footballing philosophy of a club seem to be gone, instead more clubs seem to be establishing a long-lasting philosophy or strategy as a longitudinal bedrock. Managers are now selected and expected to align and be attuned to that established framework.
HE seems to most closely mirror the latter scenario, because there’s an inherent absence of a persistent, institution-specific philosophy that shapes the priorities of learning design activity. Instead, shifts caused by strategic cycles and leadership changes can mean one year you’re playing tiki-taka football and the next you’re invoking Charles Hughes.
All this is to say, that it is quite possible for learning design activity to be built upon solid and perhaps what you might even say are immutable principles of learning, based on a long-term strategy to perpetually imbue the institution with solid underpinnings to learning experiences.
I have argued that a solid base of understanding around learning and learning experience principles would help people traverse changes in our world that influence curriculum priorities. However, UK HE seems to be stuck in a different cycle, although having said that I acknowledge the difficulty of a central guiding philosophy for learning within the federated structure of HEIs, to continue the football analogy, this structure is akin to a team that’s spelt using lots of i’s.
Is the de-facto approach changing?
Where many UK HEIs seem to have landed is a centralised learning design service or function, that aims to have wide reach. To an extent this is an obvious and unsurprising approach to take given the context. It’s a strategy that inevitably directs what approaches are used for learning design activity, and is one big factor behind the popularity and adoption of the ABC model in UK HE.
This strategy calls for a lightweight format that facilitates time-limited intervention, acting as a catalyst for thought and providing stimulus, without delving deeply into the nuances of learning experiences as courses are developed. Given the time constraints within UK HE, the adoption of an off-the-shelf solution like this aligns well.
However, it’s been interesting recently to observe more signals emerging that this largely dominant model aligned with the common strategic approach to learning design is being modified or abandoned completely, with inadequacies coming to light. Factors such as ambiguity and debates over activity type distinctions disrupting already time-limited sessions have been cited.
It’s becoming more apparent that learning designers and teams are looking to other influences to inform their practice, and bodies of work that sometimes fall under the banner of instructional design and the learning sciences seem to be having more of an influence. This perhaps hints at an appetite for learning designers to engage more deeply with the intricacies of learning experiences than momentary interventions allow.
Some greater diversity in learning design approaches and a less narrow range of influences to learning design activity would certainly be welcome. Similarly a greater degree of boldness and diversity in learning design support strategies would allow comparison to better gauge the value of different approaches.
Given that learning design activity often ends up being simultaneously about supporting the design of effective learning experiences, as well as tacit professional development for educators, different strategies might ultimately create more tangible benefits. More diverse approaches would also certainly provide a counterpoint to what sometimes can feel like the default happy sheet style impact of widespread momentary approaches.
There is certainly some distance to travel in terms of learning design activity having a deep impact in UK higher education, but there are also signs that approaches and influences are becoming more diverse and sophisticated, one wonders if strategies also need to follow suit.
