Designing for learning
New open, social and participatory media clearly have significant potential to transform learning and teaching. They offer learners and teachers a plethora of ways to communicate and collaborate; to connect with a distributed network of peers, and to find and manipulate information. In addition there are now a significant range of free educational resources and tools.
While there is great interest in using these new technologies to the benefit of learning and teaching, there seems to be a gap between the promise and reality of the use of technology in education. There is also a lack of evidence that education has changed fundamentally in light of the introduction of new technologies into the classroom. This paradox, the gap between the potential and actual use of technology, lies at the heart of the growth of a new area of research that has emerged in recent years.
Learning design research aims to better understand this mismatch. By focussing on the development of tools, design methods and approaches to help teachers design pedagogically effective learning activities, it offers a potential solution to address some of the challenges above. This 27th edition of eLearning Papers focuses on learning design, with the aim of clarifying and disseminating different perspectives and practices in the field.
The articles in this issue's In-depth section address how to best understand and use learning design, both in terms of tools and methodologies. The first pair of articles look at practical conceptualisations of learning design, supported by case examples. Dobozy's paper offers a three-tiered categorisation of learning design, while Buendía-García and Benlloch-Dualde's study attempts to track patterns in different learning scenarios and applies them to new learning design contexts. The second pair of articles reviews blended teaching or the increased participation of students in designing learning. Cameron and Tanti look at the usefulness of social media in authorising students to actively design their learning processes and Ligorio reviews six years of experimentation with a Blended Collaborative Constructive Participation (BCCP) model at the university level.
In From the Field, two classroom models are shared. Each report offers an example of teachers who have taken personalised approaches to integrating learning design strategies into their every day practices.
Taken together the articles in this special issue provide an up to date and authoritative overview of the field of learning design research and demonstrate the diversity of research that is going on in this area. “Designing for learning is the key challenge facing education today – practitioners need guidance and support to ensure that their design is pedagogically informed and effective, making innovative use of the affordances that new technologies offer” (Conole, G. Designing for learning in an open world, New York: Springer)
