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ABC LD resources in Norwegian

By Natasa Perovic, on 15 June 2018

Norwegian translation of ABC LD resources kindly provided byVegard Skipnes / LearningLab / BI Norwegian Business School (https://www.bi.edu/).

 

If you have any questions about the Norwegian translation, email Nataša for contact details.

 

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Learning types cards

 

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Tweet and shape

 

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Storyboard worksheet

 

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Action plan

ABC LD resources in Swedish

By Natasa Perovic, on 29 May 2018

Swedish translation of ABC LD resources kindly provided by Maria Sunnerstam, Pedagogisk utvecklare, PIL-enheten, Göteborgs universitet (www.pil.gu.se)

 

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ABC LD 2017 July – December summary

By Natasa Perovic, on 17 January 2018

The second half of the year was equally busy for ABC_LD.

in August, our Chilean colleagues @AprendizajeUAI from University Adolfo Ibanez facilitated workshops for 9 univerities in Santiago

Our Arena colleagues designed the Arena Two

 

We visited  UWS in Paisley

and Queen Margaret in Edinburgh

We went to ALTC 2017

to present

and facilitate ABC LD workshop

some of the participants  started using the method in the following week

Clive delivered keynote at ILIAS conference in Freiburg

and facilitated the workshop

Back in London we had a visit from  Danish collegues

 

New cohort of MRes students designed their RPD module

Colleagues  from Doha attended our workshop in London

colleagues at QMUL were playing with the ‘tool wheel’. Looking forward to seeing the QMUL version

University of Reading colleagues mentioned us in their talk at bbmoco

Eastman Dental Institute education day at Royal Free was well attended and very productive

At the same time in Italy…

Glasgow University used ABC_LD to design MOOCs

Kristy Evers presented her research work on ABC in Rome

BATJ teachers liked the method. Japanese translation expected in 2018

Colleagues at KU Leuven facilitated their forst ABC

Nick Grindle took ABC to Cyprus

While we worked in Wellcome trust in London

BEAMS

and SLMS

ABC got a place on the Learning Design family tree!

3 Arena two sessions facilitated for academics

another workshop at UCL Qatar

Clive and Natasa took ABC to OEB conference.

AOur colleague Vicki, mentions how ABC is used in Glasgow in this video

We released ABC version in French

Canterbury Christ Church colleagues ABC workshop looks well attended

Lincoln University colleagues share their thughts on ABC_LD

Where will we go next?

Teaching as design – Part 2

By Natasa Perovic, on 14 August 2017

In Teaching as design – Part 1 we describe Peter Goodyear, professor of education at the University of Sydney, as one of the inspirations for UCL’s ABC approach to learning design. In this post we explore how his concept of “teaching as design” aligns with many of our ABC activities.

In the 2013 paper “In medias res: reframing design for learning”, Goodyear and Dimitriades recognise that design s “becoming a more recognisable and significant part of the work of teachers generally” (2013:1) and felt it timely to “clarify” some ideas about design for learning as follows.

  1. Learning cannot be designed it can only be designed for – we cannot design someone else’s learning experience – hence “design for learning” rather than “learning design”. The latter term is more associated with classic notions of instructional design that require clear, discrete outcomes and compliant learners. The authors’ view of design is that it can only have an indirect effect on student learning activity.
  2. Design should be a core part of on-going educational practice, not project based i.e sustainable.
  3. Design often starts “In media res” i.e. in the middle of its lifecycle. It is rarely a blank sheet but comes from review and redesign or post validation, where many parameters have been set. Fixed project-based sequences of instructional design such as ADDIE run contrary to the cycles of normal educational development.
  4. The role of the teacher needs to be clear, especially at ‘learntime’  – i.e. when the course actually runs. If the teacher is present she can clarify and fill in the gaps on the fly; if not, as with much blended learning, careful design is much more important to identify  and pre-empt problems.
  5. “Design should look forward” – this means that adaptations and reconfigurations should be expected and accommodated, teacher support at learntime should be designed in (dashboards, activity data etc), evaluation data should be picked up and reflected on and finally this should encourage and feed into redesign.

ABC recognises all these points. In the workshop there is usually much discussion of what kind of activities can be used to reach specific learning outcomes. The “serving suggestion” of digital and conventional methods on the back of the cards indicates multiple approaches may be possible. The workshops occur by invitation and are planned for when the teams find them useful. This can occur at any time in the design and re-design cycle, but we have found “in media res” is often optimal as some preliminary thinking has already been done. ABC may be less effective with “blank sheet” course, which usually require some preliminary business case and value elicitation work to provide a focus (a “design brief”). The designers are usually also the teachers, but by storyboarding the student experience their role should become clear and is always open to cross-examination by colleagues in the  design team. We always suggest ABC designs could be used to record planned activity, identify and track changes, and benchmark intentions against outcomes. The idea of explicitly recording activity indicators is interesting and could be developed further.

The authors then proposed a ‘reframing’ of learning design theory around a number of points, including the following.

  • The focus should be on what the student does i.e. activity-centred design. The problem is one activity may span several learning outcomes, so there is no ‘optimal’ solution.
  • It is necessary to have a clear view of “that which has been designed”. Implicit activities should be avoided (e.g on-the-fly teaching) and design activity should result in the in the creation of “things” which can influence behaviour, activity, experience and learning.
  • The task impacts learning more than the mode, “it is the characteristics of the task, rather than the medium in which it is inscribed, that most influence the learning activity and its outcomes”.
  • Learning design is not only the design of tasks but the design of supporting tools and resources, the “learning environment”, and the social setting (e.g. organisation of students for group work).
  • Locus of control is always an underlying tension. Are designs explicit instructions or “just” recommendations (with implications for student autonomy) of tasks, tools and social organization? How much interpretation is allowed?

Activity-centred design is the core ethos of ABC, and the storyboard provides the “clear view”, an artifact that can be produced and discussed. The learning environment is addressed after the ABC workshop through suggestions of tools that can be used, and even a baseline of minimal provision, the UCL E-Learning Baseline.

The authors conclude; “support should be provided so that redesign may be performed as easily and fluently as possible and “good design acknowledges the fact that redesign is the norm, not the exception”. One of the challenges for ABC is providing the initial support for academic teams then maintaining a dialogue with them to encourage and support subsequent redesign. The locus of control issue is more challenging, but we have found in ABC the more experienced designer-teachers to be fairly pragmatic in how much flexibility the students can cope with.

In the 2015 paper “Teaching as design” referred to in the previous article Peter Goodyear elaborates these principles but makes it clearer what design is, and that “planning and design are not the same thing”.

Design typically results in the creation of specifications of some kind, rather than directly in a finished product. It produces blueprints, plans, sketches: inscriptions of various types, that guide the creation of an imagined end product”. This is very much what we intend with the ABC storyboards, they do not attempt to create the actual learning objects, that is intended to occur post-workshop. He reiterates, “design usually entails resolving tensions between competing objectives”.

Reframing the problem and running small-scale ‘design experiments’ are typical designerly responses.

In the 2015 paper Peter makes a forceful argument that

“… teaching traditionally—in the literal sense of teaching as one was taught oneself—is unable to cope with the changes now besetting higher education. Shifting resources towards design for learning, and adopting more effective design practices, is a credible strategy for improving the quality of higher education while managing with tighter funding”.

He thus presents both an economic and an educational case for supporting the design process institutionally and building capacity among lecturers and professional support staff.

Four drivers of change are identified, familiar to anyone working in the higher education sector that make, “teaching approaches that may have been the norm 20 or even 10 years ago no longer look affordable or appealing”.

teaching_as_design

Image  – Drivers of change: ‘teaching as design’ as a means of resolving conflicting forces shaping contemporary higher education (Goodyear 2015)

 

It is not hard to see how Peter’s arguments here align with ABC’s approach to learning design. Putting design at the centre of these clear challenges emphasises that,

evidence-informed, creative, design-based strategies will be needed if universities are to generate innovative repertoires of educational approaches to deal with, and ideally to anticipate, changes in their operating environments”.

He adds

“This assertion means much more than employing greater numbers of better-trained educational designers, useful though this should be. It means making universities more design-savvy; helping everyone in the institution participate in knowledgeable, design-led change.”

This is what ABC aims to achieve at UCL and beyond.

(The rest of the paper expands on the science of design and may be addressed at another time).

 

References

Goodyear, P. (2015). Teaching as design. HERDSA Review of Higher Education, 2, 27–50.

Goodyear, P., Dimitriadis, Y. (2013). In medias res: reframing design for learning. Research in Learning Technology, 21(SUPPL.1), 1-13.

 

 

ABC LD 2017 January to July summary

By Natasa Perovic, on 11 August 2017

ABC LD team had a very busy year so far.

In January we facilitated ABC workshop for our UCL RITS colleagues

followed by learnhack 3.0 , where students designed for learning of their radio audience in Nepal.


At the end of January we visited University of Milan and facilitated 2 workshops; one with resources in English and the second one with resources in Italian.

In February we were back at UCL for new Medical Sciences MSc

On the road again – workshops in Lund University in Sweden

Jess took ABC to UCL Qatar

And Natasa updated LDCIN on ABC progress

In March we facilitated ‘train the trainer’ ABC workshop in Canterbury Christ Church University

and three Arena two sessions in UCL

we worked with UCL MOOCs teams (MOOCs ABC cards)


and short courses teams (in nice locations)

In April we worked with programme review teams in UCL

Updated HEFCE on ACE progress

and participated in ABC Webinar for Swedish audience (recording)

In May we facilitated workshops at Tallinn University in Estonia

and Skovde Univerity (video) in Sweden

We faciliatated ‘train the trainer’ workshop with a great TEL team in University of Reading

In June Natasa and Maria from Lund faciliated ABC workshop at EDEN17 conference in Jonkoping


Clive and Natasa facilitated ABC at JISC connectmore17 event in London

and at Learning at City conference at City University London

followed by 3 workshops at Univeristy of Utrecht

Jess facilitated ABC workshop in Denmark

Clive and Natasa presented about ABC at ConnectingHE conference (x3)

and facilitated ABC at JISC connectmore17 in Birmingham

In July we presented our paper “The Secret of ABC Rapid  Learning Design: Think Globally, Act Locally” with Manuela from University of Milan at Edulearn17 conference (slideshare)

On our way home, we visited Gemma and her digital education colleagues at Univeristy of Barcelona

Back at the base we had a great programme review workshop with Health informatics team in UCL


before spending two interesting and productive days working at the UPMC Sorbonne Univeristies  in Paris

We finished our ABC tour at the excellent TELfest at University of Reading

ABC LD learning types and tools

By Natasa Perovic, on 10 August 2017

We mapped the tools used by our academic colleagues to the ABC learning types.

This is non editable PDF (size A3) version of the file, relevant to UCL. The file will be updated annually. If you would like to adapt the ‘tool wheel’ for your university, please contact us and we will send it to you in editable format.

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Our colleagues from University of Reading adapted the ‘tool wheel’ to suit their learning environment and are happy to share it, too. Thank you to Adam Bailey and colleagues from Centre for Quality Support and Development – technology Enhanced Learning http://www.reading.ac.uk/cqsd/TechnologyEnhancedLearning/cqsd-TechnologyEnhancedLearning.aspx@UniRdg_TEL.

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ABC LD resources for designing FutureLearn MOOCs

By Natasa Perovic, on 18 July 2017

ABC LD Resources produced for UCL staff designing FutureLearn MOOCs.PO_FL_week1

 

ABC LD workshop presentation for FL MOOCs

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ABC LD graph (A4)

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ABC LD cards for FutureLearn MOOCs (each cards hould be printed in A6)

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ABC LD worksheet (storyboard) – (A1)

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ABC LD additional online activities (A4)

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ABC LD FL tools mapped to learning types (A3, not editable)

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—–

The ABC Learning Design is built on curriculum design research from the JISC* (Viewpoints) and work of Prof Diana Laurillard, UCL IoE** (learning types).
* Viewpoints project (2008-2013),
**Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York and London: Routledge.


ABC_LD resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Please let us know if you are using the ABC_LD resources and/or would like to be part of ABC_LD community

ABC LD 2016 summary

By Natasa Perovic, on 22 December 2016

2016 was a busy year for ABC LD!

In May

  • we visited our colleague Vicky Dale at Glasgow University and  facilitated ABC LD workshop in Glasgow

Academics working ontheir ABC LD

In June

  • ABC LD found its place in the UCL Education strategy

In September

  • We visited Delphine Wante and Sofie Bamelis in VIVES, Belgium and facilitated ABC LD workshops in Bruges

  • And in Kortrijk

November

  • Our Cornwall College colleague David Bevington facilitated ABC LD workshops in Cornwall College

Cornwall College ABC workshop

  • Clive and Natasa took ABC LD to Santiago, Chile, visiting Robert Pardo and UAI

December

  • Started working on ABC LD evaluation as a part of UCL’s new HEFCE-funded curriculum enhancement project

Following our successful bid to the HEFCE Catalyst Fund, which aims to drive innovation in the higher education sector, Digital Education and CALT launch a new project today called UCL Action for Curriculum Enhancement (ACE). Read more..

  • Our DigiEd colleague Jess Gramp facilitated ABC LD workshop at the University of Queensland, Australia

 

In 2016, we also facilitated many ABC LD workshops in UCL

  • For new and existing programmes

module teams @UCL_Pain_MSc #abc_ld workshop pic.twitter.com/b2bSETCaM3

  • For MOOCs (produced ABC_LD cards for MOOCs with FutureLearn colleagues)

  • For students (facilitated the first workshop with students)

  • With DIgiEd team we mapped learning technologies to learning types

 

2017 looks even busier for ABC LD team. See prospective ABC LD workshops on the map below

ABC_LD community map

Happy 2017 to all!

ABC LD team


ABC has reached 21

By Natasa Perovic, on 24 March 2016

Digital Education has now run 21 of our popular rapid learning design workshops. ABC uses an effective and engaging paper card-based method in a 90 minute hands-on workshop. It is based on research from the JISC and UCL IoE and over the last year has helped 70 module and course teams design and sequence engaging learning activities. It has proved particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or more blended format.

To find out if ABC is for you this short video captured one of our workshops earlier this year.

Participants feedback remains encouragingly  positive 

“I thought the ABC session was really helpful.  I had been a little unsure ahead of the session what it would achieve – but I genuinely got a lot from it.  Going back to the basics of methods etc really helped focus on the structure and balance of the module.  I thought the output was very useful.”

“Thank you for convening the abc workshop today, i  found it thought provoking and challenged the way we think about our teaching. It is too easy to stick to what we have done previously and I found today gave me different ways to think about how to evaluate our current teaching and to bring in different approaches. It will definitely improve my thinking and I will continue with the approach to incorporate some of the ideas into the modules.”

“Thank you for the workshop today- it was an eye opener. I found it really useful to think about categorising how the learning objectives will be delivered and assessed, and examining the variety of ways that these can be achieved. It made me think more deeply about what skills the students can develop by making them responsible for their learning journey and not simply the content that needs to be delivered to them. We will let you know how it goes!”

“It was great and many initiatives have emerged from it.”

abc workshop group work

For questions and workshops contact Clive and Nataša

cy_np

 

 

 

For more information see :

ABC Curriculum Design 2015 Summary
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2015/12/02/abc-curriculum-design-2015-summary/

ABC workshop resources and participants’ feedback http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2015/09/30/9169/

ABC beginnings http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2015/04/09/abc-arena-blended-connected-curriculum-design/

 

ABC News:

We are currently developing an online toolkit to support the workshop, have been working closely with CALT to embed the Connected Curriculum in designs and we are developing collaboration projects with The University of Glasgow, Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Leiden (Netherland) and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile) in order to look at the learning impact of this method. Our colleagues in Chile are even translating the workshop into Spanish.

ABC also featured on UCL Teaching and Learning portal as a case study: Designing programmes and modules with ABC curriculum design http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies-news/e-learning/designing-abc-curriculum-design

ABC Curriculum Design 2015 Summary

By Natasa Perovic, on 2 December 2015

ABC Curriculum tour dates for 2016 and Summary of 2015

For questions and workshops contact Clive and Nataša

cy_np

Book us early! We start our ABC 2016 tour with a visit to Glasgow!

The ABC curriculum design method uses an effective and engaging paper card-based approach in a 90 minute hands-on workshop. It is based on research from the JISC and UCL IoE and designed to help module teams design engaging learning activities. It is particularly useful for new programmes or those changing to an online or more blended format. More information below.

 

December 2015 – ALT Winter Conference webinar

The ABCs of rapid blended course design by Clive Young and Nataša Perović. Recording of the session is available to view here: http://go.alt.ac.uk/1NIpziZ

 

December 2015A brief overview of ABC curriculum design method by Clive

 

 

October 2015 – Presentation about the ABC workshops

 

 

 

September 2015 – Progress with ABC Curriculum design and downloadable ABC workshop resources and participants’ feedback 

 

 

March 2015 – ABC beginnings, by Clive and Natasa

 

March 2015 – Blog post about the First ABC Curriculum design workshop