tips and tricks for awesome learning design
Improving the experience for new students
Starting a new course at university can be both exciting and terrifying for students. But however students feel, they are unlikely to be able to focus on their studies until they feel accepted as...
Reducing cognitive load
You will know this: if someone asks you to remember, say, a shopping list, you can hold onto several items in your head, perhaps as many as nine if you’re good at it. You may be doing quite...
3 tips for working with SMEs
As Learning Designers, our role is not to be the content expert - it’s to ensure the overall learning experience is engaging, inclusive and focused on the learning outcomes. The content...
Supporting dyspraxic learners with learning design
We are trying harder than you can imagine,’ says dyspraxic teacher Kerry Pace (2015). She suggests that we – non-dyspraxics – might think about how we feel when we’re exhausted: the things we...
The role of personas in learning design
What are learner personas? Learner personas provide a practical way for us learning designers to focus our empathy. But why do we need to do this? The reason is to help us determine the difficulty...
Anticipating dyslexia benefits all learners
The UK government spends a great deal on supporting dyslexic students in HE – and they almost certainly get value back on that money in the workplace. At the same time, many dyslexic students go...
Are you a hidden learning designer?
The arrival of the New Year usually brings a moment of reflection, where we ask ourselves ‘am I happy in my job? Can I spend another 12 months doing the same thing? What is the meaning of life? If...
Learning to experiment: here be dragons
As they plan a session, good learning designers ask themselves: What do students have to know to make this lesson work? But what students have already been taught or already know in their subject...
Designing for autistic learners
Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment? Cybernetics and computer...
Why ‘little and often’ delivers flexible learning
At some point in our lives, most of us will have had to write an essay. And many of us will have left that essay until the last minute. This situation is the product of poor learning design. It's...
Tackling procrastination with learning design
Piers Steel is an expert in procrastination at the University of Calgary. In an interview on the BBC's One to One programme, Steel comments that by tracing our social media activity,...
Design learning for accountability
Learning anything is an effort. As learning designers, we have to convince learners that it's worth them making the effort to learn. One way of doing this is to design activities that require...
Are you building a creepy treehouse for your learners?
So what is a 'creepy treehouse' in learning design, and how do you know if you've built one? When Jeremy Hunsinger talked with Ding on our podcast, he used the phrase 'creepy treehouse' to describe...
Cognitive constructivism
In a previous post, we proposed that learning theories are key tools in every learning designer's toolbox. There are many different theories that attempt to explain how learning happens, and no...
Use learners’ prior knowledge to guide learning design
Everybody knows something. In fact, we all know a great deal - even by the time we’re about three years old. Yet a common problem in learning design is assuming that learners have no ‘prior...
Learning theories are design tools
Learning theories are tools. A surgeon has tools, a builder has tools. And theories are some of the most powerful tools a learning designer can use to build learning experiences. Different learning...
Why empathy is the ultimate tool in learning design
1.2 The role of empathy in learning design Empathy often makes people roll their eyes. They think it's all about being warm and fluffy. Not so. In learning design, and in teaching, empathy is about...
Should educators have exceptional digital literacies?
To what extent is it an educator's responsibility to be not just technologically literate, but exceptional? This question formed the basis of our first weekly Soap Box debate in the Creative...
