What is Learning Design?

What is Learning Design?

That depends on who you ask, but I’ll tell you why I landed on Learning Designer as the bucket I’m throwing my skills in. 

Before I start, I want to point out that I'm shortening Learning Experience Design (LXD) to Learning Design here. It's just my personal preference.

In all my 16 years of teaching, 15 of those being online, I’ve always made a distinction between design and delivery of a course. 

I initially made this distinction because the very first course I taught, a “developmental” writing course at the local community college, counted as an internship during my last semester of my Master’s degree. So I was expected to design first as part of my portfolio. 

The design is what happens before you have learning active in a learning space. It’s the planning, the creation, the outlined detailed steps to get from point A to point B (often referred to as Instructional Design, or ID). I walked into class every day with lesson plans (ok, they were lesson plans only I could understand, but they were plans nonetheless). 

Then, I got to deliver my lesson plans. The delivery of the course is the active instruction that happens. This is the enactment of the design. This is often called teaching. 

After I trained to teach online that following spring, and continued to do research, both formal and informal, on how my plans and my teaching were impacting students, I realized how important the experiences of my students and myself were and how those varied depending on what school I was teaching with. 

Good learning experience design (LXD) combines good design with good delivery and adds the layer of how those things are experienced into the mix. Ideally, this layer is investigated and added on before, during, and after the design and delivery have taken place. LXD is iterative and cyclical. 

Ideally, ID should be doing this, but it often gets disconnected from the experience of instruction AND the experience of the learners that are in the specific context that the experience was designed for. My absolute favorite example of this is a course that I helped redesign in 2014. It had been awhile and the textbook had updated. It was called Technical Editing. I know someone who teaches that class now. IT HASN’T CHANGED. Not only has it not changed, but it hasn’t updated for the fact that the textbook is no longer being printed. Students buy used copies. 

The LXD iterations make sure all parties are taken into consideration in crafting and implementing experiences that real people that want to learn and to teach will have.

So what exactly is a learning experience?

This would be any experience in which learning does or is supposed to happen. In LXD, these experiences are crafted, curated experiences designed with how the learner will experience the learning in mind. Well that was a mouthful. Let’s break it down. 

Traditionally, learning situations have focused on the how from the instruction perspective, this is where the term instructional design comes from. However, some research in learning has focused on student perspectives. BUT. This is often after the fact - how are students reacting to the learning that has been designed for them and that they’ve experienced in a course. Ideally, it’s done more continually throughout an iteration.

Finally, a learning experience includes everything: the content delivery, the content engagement, the content application, and it’s also important to take the user interface into consideration - how are students going to get the content, do the activities - what technology is going to be best suited for this content, these activities, this type of learner and problem? 

How do you create a good learning experience?

In an ideal world with all the resources and time available, you would talk to potential students to get an idea of where they’re coming from (what experiences they’ve had), where they need to get to (what they’re trying to learn/what problem they’re trying to solve, and why), and the contexts they operate in (what their lives are like). 

This information is important because it can help you craft just the right experience to help solve a problem for just the right group of people. Then, you’d revisit the goals you’ve set out, plan ways to get your potential students from A to B in a way that takes their prior experiences/knowledge into consideration as well as what their day to day is like, and build and beta test. 

A beta test should focus on feedback for improving the experience of the learner. 

But don’t forget the instructor. How the teacher experiences the course (whether that’s you or someone else or several someone elses) is important. It needs to be sustainable. 

So really good LXD is about understanding users' needs and finding a balance between the needs of all stakeholders to create the best experience possible for teaching and learning that results in improved outcomes.

This looks slightly different depending on where you’re operating. For example:

• If you’re a course creator with an online business, that might involve asking your audience you already have, or finding people that have the problem you want to solve, and asking them questions. This might sound vaguely like market research, but you’ll ask a different set of questions (the answers can be used for marketing, though, and I’ve got a whole post dedicated to that in the works!). You’d then take what they’ve said and what you planned and see both where they align, what you’re willing to do, and what fits the expectations of both parties. Then beta test it, get feedback, revise, and relaunch.

• If you’re in corporate, that might involve a needs assessment where you’re figuring out what the needs are for every potential stakeholder (managers, employees, customers, etc.), building and implementing something to fit those needs, reassessing whether the intervention worked, and revising and trying again.

• If you’re in higher education, that might involve getting feedback from a previous class, it is tough to get input from students that are not yet your students, redesigning or designing something new, and then getting feedback throughout for the next time. It might, though, include getting feedback from teachers, if others are going to be teaching the course you designed. It might also involve negotiating with administration, departments, and licensing bodies about what “HAS” to be in the course. 

As you can see, though, the core is the same: understand the “who” that has a say or will be involved, create, and iterate based on that understanding and continue the investigation to understand.