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Learning Designers. What do they do, and do you need one?

By Antonella Veccia, on 21 August 2024

The landscape of Higher Education has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, with online learning becoming an increasingly popular choice among adults. Recent publications including What do higher education students want from online learning? (2023) or Shaping the Future of Online Learning (2024) have highlighted the need for improvements in several key areas to enhance the quality and effectiveness of online education.

While academics bring essential expertise and deep knowledge of their content areas, transitioning to online learning environments can be challenging. This is where Learning Designers can help, offering specialised skills to optimise students’ online learning experience.

A common misconception about Learning Designers

Learning Designers are sometimes seen as tech-savvy professionals who manage the technical aspects of course delivery, such as uploading materials to platforms, video editing, or even coding. This perspective is understandable given the prominent role that digital technology plays in online learning; however, this perception can prevent academics from fully use the Learning Designers’ expertise.

Learning Designers are educational specialists with expertise in adult learning in online environments. Their primary focus is planning, designing, and strategically using educational technology to support teaching and learning.

Understanding the role of Learning Designers

Given their expertise, Learning Designers recognise that different modes of delivering education require distinct approaches.

While the foundational principles of learning are consistent across face-to-face and online contexts, directly replicating in-person methods online doesn’t work. For example, traditional classrooms benefit from face-to-face interactions, spontaneous discussions, and non-verbal cues. In the absence of these elements, online environments rely on technology to mediate interactions. This shift requires tailored strategies to engage students, maintain motivation, and ensure accessibility and success for all learners, regardless of background or ability.

Learning Designers can play a pivotal role in this process as they are skilled at tailoring the learning experience to meet the needs, challenges and motivations of adult learners and can combine pedagogy and technology to effectively support desired learning outcomes.

Technology meets pedagogy

Learning Designers typically work across different academic subjects but are not subject matter experts. Instead, they partner with academics to translate their expertise into engaging online courses.

Platforms like Moodle, for example, exemplify the potential of technology to support a learner-centred approach, allowing instructional strategies that combine passive and active learning. A passive learning activity might involve students watching a pre-recorded lecture or reading an article, where they absorb information independently. This can be complemented by an active learning component, such as summarising the content of the article, or participating in a discussion forum where students are encouraged to contribute their thoughts and engage in peer-to-peer dialogue.

However, academic presence remains a critical component of online courses. Tutors provide essential guidance, offer timely and constructive feedback, and support students in navigating the course material.

This integrated approach is linked to improved educational outcomes and a more engaging learning experience.

Designing for synchronous and asynchronous learning

Flexibility is crucial when designing online courses, particularly for adult learners who often require adaptable learning schedules or may join from different time zones.

Learning Designers focus on creating a seamless blend of synchronous and asynchronous components to maintain learner engagement while providing flexibility. They achieve this by assessing (in collaboration with academics) which activities are best suited for asynchronous delivery or synchronous interaction.

Moreover, Learning Designers can assist and address common challenges typically affecting synchronous sessions—such as students feeling unprepared or overwhelmed—by designing robust asynchronous activities that build the necessary knowledge and skills beforehand and by ensuring that activities build on each other and clearly align to the intended outcomes.

This careful blending of synchronous and asynchronous elements, coupled with well-designed support mechanisms like clear instructions, timely feedback, and additional resources, ensures that learners are equipped to actively participate and succeed in both activities.

Learning design is a collaborative endeavour

At UCL, we know that a great online course requires a carefully crafted experience that considers every aspect of the learner’s journey. That’s why Learning Designers work together with a team of experts.

We partner with academics to translate their expertise into engaging content and ensure learning outcomes are met. We work closely with Learning Technologists to select and implement digital tools, providing a seamless technical experience for staff and students. We liaise with multimedia developers and graphic designers when the course requires the production of assets such as video, animations, or interactive simulations.

This multi-faceted approach ensures that online courses are relevant, pedagogically sound, technically robust, accessible, and aesthetically appealing.

Ready to enhance your online course? Contact us to discover how our Learning Designers can help you create an engaging and effective learning experience.

 

Online Learning: Community of Practice

By Oliver Vas and Jo Stroud, on 13 February 2024

black smartphone and laptop near person

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Online Learning is a rapidly expanding area in higher education around the world. While it became a necessity during the pandemic, an increasing number of students and short course learners are choosing to study their degrees fully online. Currently UCL offers around 40 postgraduate programmes with a significant distance learning component, just over half of which are delivered fully remotely.

As such, we’re setting up an Online Learning Community of Practice (OLCoP; catchy, we know) to bring together staff who teach and support online programmes, modules, and short courses at UCL.

At this stage, OLCoP is an informal group, and we hope to use regular meetings and the Teams space to:

  • Share best practices in online teaching and learning
  • Build a communication hub between academic departments, central, and local services
  • Identify and recommend professional development opportunities
  • Disseminate new and changing information relating to policy, quality assurance, pedagogies, technology, and more
  • Ensure that issues relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion in online learning are properly represented
  • Gather actionable feedback from staff and students regarding online learning experiences.

If you are interested in joining, please complete this short form. This will also send you an invite to our Teams space.

We will be holding our first meeting of OLCoP on 13th March 2024 at 2:30pm.

This first meeting will take place as a hybrid event and act as an opportunity to get to know other staff teaching and developing online courses.

Those who wish to attend in person can join us at the training suite at the Anna Freud Centre, not too far from King’s Cross station, while those who prefer to join online can do so via Teams. We will have facilitators in both spaces.

You can register to attend using the form linked above.

We hope you can join us!

Leeds Online Learning Summit 2023

By Oliver Vas, on 28 July 2023

Picture by Oliver Vas

On the 10th and 11th July, Tim Otway and I attended in-person The University of Leeds’ first ever Online Learning Summit, where we met a number of other colleagues from other institutions and went to a series of presentations throughout both days. The agenda was broad ranging, though it could roughly be categorised into three themes: creating design ecosystems, extending accessibility and enabling lifelong learning.

Firstly, we received an overview of the current outlook within HE online learning from Neil Mosley, and later from Sam Brenton, Melissa Highton and others. They spoke about witnessing steady growth in demand for online learning in the UK, as well as more rapid growth abroad. Sam Brenton mentioned that UK institutions are in a good place to take advantage of increased demand but must capitalise quickly. Neil Mosley foresaw the slow decline of MOOCs as interest intensifies in more flexible, stackable programs such as micro credentials – a topic that featured prominently in the summit. During the event participants grappled with formulating a ‘manifesto’ to standardise the regulation and awarding of micro credentials. Melissa Highton mentioned that while micro credentials still remain relatively unknown, CPD courses are the most highly searched for online. Data shows that learners typically want CPD that is badged, accredited and associated with a known brand or institution.

We also heard from educators who have enjoyed great success as online-only institutions, such as Joann Kozyrev, VP at Western Governors University, who spoke about moving away from the ‘time served’ model to great effect: allowing learners to progress once they meet the completion requirements rather than inflexible time markers. In their case, students pay a fixed fee for 6 months of learning, within which time they can take as many or as few credits as they wish.

Given the novel nature of a lot of challenges faced in the sector, the summit focused on a number of original and effective problem-solving techniques. One notable technique was Aaron Kessler’s learning engineering process which emphasised the continual need to “close the loop” between the stages of challenge, creation, implementation and investigation.  We also learnt about the differences between systems thinking, design thinking and futures thinking, and participated in Leah Henrickson’s “What-if” experiment, brainstorming possible future scenarios in 5-year increments.

The summit then attempted to apply these problem-solving techniques directly to a few of the challenges, specifically: AI and ethics, the nature of assessment, and accessibility integration. Donald Clark asked whether considerations over ethics in AI are doing more harm than good. He pointed out that the more cautious countries risk falling behind unnecessarily, since regulatory efforts are unlikely to be successful. Later, a panel debated the role of assessment and whether online learning had any chance of moving away from the grade-centred approach that dominates most of the education sector. Ultimately, they concluded that assessment remains a necessary tool to show that learning has taken place. Lasty, we heard from course alumni on how accessibility had improved their course experience. They emphasised that accessibility should be embedded from the start of programme development, rather than treated as an afterthought.

Overall, the conference was well organised and successful at balancing its in-person and online audiences. The experience was greatly enhanced by the attendance of a digital artist who drew live tableaus during each talk, helping to illustrate and reinforce key concepts.

Workshop series: designing and managing online learning- synchronously and asynchronously

By Alexandra Mihai, on 2 November 2020

To support faculty in designing and teaching their online courses in the next terms, learning designers Alexandra Mihai and Heather Serdar from the Online Education team are offering in the next months a series of four new workshops aimed at providing practical guidance for designing and managing learning activities using both synchronous and asynchronous modalities.

The workshops have been designed as stand-alone 90-minute sessions but attending all four of them provides a 360 degrees perspective on the online teaching experience- from design to delivery, including a curated selection of resources and customisable templates.

Synchronous online teaching

Orchestrating synchronous interactions in the virtual classroom needs to be more intentionally planned than in a face-to-face environment. Setting clear goals and understanding where live sessions can bring the most added value to the learning experience is an important starting point. A well-managed live online teaching session can create opportunities for engagement and conversation.

The session on Designing synchronous learning activities provides practical guidance on how to design synchronous online learning sessions, including creating a variety of learning activities to engage students throughout the session, deciding what interaction channels to use and setting up effective mechanism for moderation and time management.

To complement it, the session on Teaching synchronous classes focuses on creating a community of practice, setting learner expectations of synchronous learning and teaching and managing groups in synchronous sessions.

Asynchronous online teaching

The online space can provide a flexible learning environment, without space and time constraints. Learning takes place also beyond the virtual classroom. In order to make sure students are motivated and engaged, asynchronous learning activities have to be carefully designed and managed.

The session on Designing asynchronous learning activities offers practical guidance on designing and sequencing asynchronous learning activities. Participants will have the opportunity to zoom into the actual activity design process and discuss how to create different individual and group learning activities, how to communicate them clearly to students and how to embed them into the overall course.

Moving on to the more practical aspects, the fourth session of the series, Teaching with asynchronous learning activities provides the opportunity to discuss communities of learning, learn about different activities that are appropriate for various subject areas and identify functions in Moodle that support asynchronous learning.

Here is the schedule of the new workshops. You can register here.

Wednesday, 4 November

Wednesday, 9 December

12:00- 13:30 Designing synchronous learning activities
Tuesday, 10 November 13:00- 14:30 Teaching synchronous classes
Tuesday, 24 November 14:00- 15:30 Designing asynchronous learning activities
Wednesday, 2 December 12:00- 13:30 Teaching with asynchronous learning activities

In addition to the new workshops, Heather and Alexandra will still run two 60-minutes sessions of the Designing Connected Learning Lectures this year, on Wednesday, 18 November, 12:00 and Wednesday, 16 December, 12:00.

We look forward to welcoming you to the workshops and supporting you in designing and teaching your courses.

Connected Learning Essentials – now open to teaching staff outside of UCL

By Jo Stroud, on 7 October 2020

In Term 1 of 2020/21, UCL’s core teaching is taking place online. There has been significant planning and an extensive amount of work from across the institution to support this transition, including a range of centrally-organised opportunities for staff to learn more about online teaching and learning.

The Connected Learning Essentials programme

One such opportunity is Connected Learning Essentials, an online course that was swiftly developed by Digital Education, the Arena Centre for Research-Based Education, Library, and colleagues based in academic departments, and run in multiple two-week-long cohorts from June to September 2020. The course was developed with recognition of the challenges facing staff and what could be achieved in a short period of time, and introduced some of the most urgent and important aspects of positive and active online teaching. Programme sections include:

  • Taking a Connected Learning Approach
  • Securing student engagement
  • Ensuring a consistent learning environment for students
  • Assessment
  • Designing for students’ active learning
  • Curating and making resources
  • Knowing students are engaging and learning.

It is important to note that the course only covers the basics, and was supplemented with a range of further opportunities to broaden the scope of course topics, including a series of live sessions and localised support within departments and faculties to support distinct pedagogic approaches.

Enrol on Connected Learning Essentials

The course is now open to anyone who might like to use it, regardless of where you work. You don’t need to progress through everything in order, either. You can dip in-and-out of specific sections depending on what you need or interests you most. If you find you need to move your teaching online very quickly, you might focus on sections 2, 3, and 5, and return to others later. While some UCL-specific content has been removed or genericised for other contexts, there will be occasions upon which guidance refers to UCL policies, practice, or platforms.

To access the course:

  • Navigate to Connected Learning Essentials (open) and click the Login link
  • If you don’t have a UCLeXtend account already, click ‘Create new account’ and complete the sign up process. If you do, sign in and you should be directed to the course
  • In the ‘Self enrol’ field, enter the enrolment key: ‘CLEUCL’.

Reusing material from Connected Learning Essentials

Material and activities from Connected Learning Essentials are available to download in Word format as part of the course and are licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. Alternatively, if you work in digital education, educational development, or a similar role at another institution and would like to reuse and adapt the course on your own platform this may be possible via a course export. If you have any questions about this please contact extend@ucl.ac.uk.

Teaching Continuity – a Moodle Toolkit

By Clive Young, on 23 March 2020

Getting started

As we move our teaching materials online, we have is an opportunity to make more active use of Moodle. Moodle is already familiar to students and academic colleagues, but mainly as a repository for module materials and a place to upload assignments. Moodle has many other tools that can help keep your students engaged and learning in the absence of face-to-face sessions. The environment also provides student access to Blackboard Collaborate for online ‘tutorials’, Lecturecast Universal Capture Personal for short video recordings and the UCL reading list service. Both of these tools are key in UCL’s approach to teaching continuity.

UCL already has a well over 100 step-by-step Miniguides to help you set up and use all of the tools in Moodle, but as this may be a little overwhelming, this Toolkit focuses on a few simple enhancements can make a big difference to your students’ online experience.

Baseline

The first priority is always to check courses against the E-learning Baseline. Poor structuring of Moodle is an issue in terms of accessibility and student stress. The Baseline is now well-established at UCL and applying it helps students navigate online learning activities. Attention is particularly drawn to the first five sections of the Baseline;

Surveys show these are the elements of Moodle our students notice most and are often most critical of. They are also the easiest to improve.

How can we do more with Moodle?

This short (5’) video from an earlier post offers some excellent ideas.

The video has captions and a transcript.https://mediacentral.ucl.ac.uk/Play/22870

In addition to Collaborate and Lecturecast Universal Capture Personal, both very important to replace face-to-face sessions, three Moodle-specific ideas are mentioned.

  • The first is Discussion Forums, often considered the mainstay of online learning. Many staff already use the News forum to announce exam dates and times; changes to exams, lectures or seminars; important information about coursework; and special announcements relating to events and when you post a message in the News Forum it will be emailed to enrolled students’ UCL email. The video refers to ‘Learning forums’ can be used for asynchronous discussion (i.e. not ‘real time’) and learning activities. They enable both staff and students to post and reply to posts and are usually are set to allow students and staff to choose whether or not to become or remain subscribed to a forum. We recommend that Question and Answer forums are set up for students to ask questions about the course work or assessment processes. As the video explains, make the purpose of every discussion forum clear, including how students are expected to engage with it and how often staff will reply to posts (if at all). If you want to speak to students in ‘real time’, for example for virtual Office Hours, you might want to try Moodle’s instant messaging style tool, Chat.
  • Quiz is the other popular tool for online engagement. A quiz is a useful way to test or evaluate students’ knowledge and to keep them motivated by letting them see areas for improvement. Marking can be automated on some question types (such as multiple choice). Staff can see a detailed breakdown of results, as well as statistics on how easy or discriminating each question is. It can be used for both formative and summative (credit bearing) assessment, such as in class tests or examinations, but the latter is usually done in a ‘live’ classroom, so for online learning summative quizzes are more normal.
  • Use of external resources will already be a familiar custom for many academic colleagues, but bear in mind YouTube is blocked in several countries, including China. The video also mentions LinkedIn Learning, Box of Broadcasts (log in with your UCL details) and ReadingLists@UCL, all useful enhancements. UCL Mediacentral can be used to host your own videos which can then embedded as links in Moodle.

Moodle: beyond the basics

As always, we recommend you keep it simple and prioritise the essentials, but don’t be afraid to go beyond the basics if you can. Here are a few ideas. If you want to dive a little deeper, the UCL’s ABC method of learning design can help plan how to move learning activities online in a more structured way. You may want also explore beyond Moodle, to Reflect, UCL’s blogging service based on WordPress.

Moodle Resources

  • Book displays collections of web pages in a sequential, easy-to-navigate and printable format. They are especially useful when you have a lot of web content but don’t want it to clutter the front page of your course. Pages can contain links, images, embedded YouTube videos, etc and feature a Table of Contents.
  • Lessons can be used to build structured pathways through learning materials and test knowledge as students make progress. Students usually make choices on each page area, sending send them to another specific page in the manner of a decision tree.

Moodle Activities

  • Glossary provides a course-specific list of terms and definitions. Entries can be linked to words that appear within Moodle, so the definition pops-up when someone hovers their mouse over instances of the word. A tutor may stipulate definitions or ask students to contribute.
  • Database enables tutors to set up form fields that students can then complete to contribute entries to the database. The fields may consist of images, files, URLs, numbers, plain text etc.
  • Hot Question is used to create a hotlist of popular questions or topics from a group. Could be used to seed a discussion forum or a Collaborate session.

Where can I see more?

  1. Colleagues at UCL Institute of Education (IOE) Learning Technologies Unit have put together a Moodle course Moodle Activity Examples – LTU (login required) showing you the tools above in use, together with several others.
  2. They are also in the process of  developing Moving online a very useful resource containing step-by-step workflows on how to move sessions online, with links to further support sources.
  3. The Miniguides site is the place to go to for detailed ideas and information on these and other Moodle tools. Support on other tools is available from the ISD Digital Education webpages.