24 - 30 January 2013
Twitter hashtag: #oldsmooc_w3
Week 3 is led by Professor Gráinne Conole, Director of the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester and will be co- facilitated by Rebecca Galley from the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University.
This week will focus on design representations and their value in enabling design thinking, discourse and sharing. Understanding the form of design thinking will build upon your previous work in this MOOC, namely the vision for your Learning Design, your project (group or individual) and way in which learner context may impact upon design. Throughout the week you will be introduced to a number of conceptual learning designs that will help you to develop your own design ideas and representations, and enable you to consider Pedagogical Patterns, the focus of week 4 activities.
Week 3 activities on Cloudworks
Download the transcript of Week 3 Introduction Video
- Conceptualise the learning design process from different perspectives
- Apply some learning design resources, tools and methods to your design
- Critique a range of pedagogical approaches and the role that different technologies play
- Review, share and discuss the theoretical underpinnings, benefits and limitations of design representations across educational contexts
- Develop an innovative storyboard, learning activities and a structure for implementation
- Opportunity to gain the 3 Weeks and Resource Gatherer badges
Routes
Expected time required to engage minimally with all activities is 8+ hours.
- Short route 2+ hours (Activities 1, 2, 8 & 9): This covers ways to imagine and conceive designs and feedback on their application but involves reduced time using them in your own design or project.
Introduction
The ideate phase of designing encompasses all those activities associated with visualising what the design might look like, and forming ideas of how it will work in practice. Designers use a variety of representations: such as informal sketches, lists, tables and concept map visualisations. Each representation helps to bring out particular aspects and perspectives on the design. A combination of representations may be needed to effectively visualise the learning event.Ideate tools have now been developed to help express and understand an imagined design. These tools, in turn, have already begun to be configured as ‘toolkits’ to fit particular institutional contexts or conceptual models, or as ‘toolboxes’ compiled by crowd-sourcing or by expert review.
In this week, you will have the opportunity to use some of these tools, evaluate them and to think more broadly about what you may want to see next time you open your own ‘toolbox.’ The focus here is on those first steps in imagining your design and how this can be supported by using learning design tools and activities.
Thursday
Activity 1: (15 minutes): Research has shown that individuals, teams and institutions can adopt quite different approaches to how they set about conceiving of and describing learning designs. In part this may reflect different approaches to teaching and different institutional cultures. Spend 10 minutes thinking about the last time you needed to design a learning experience (for other learners or for yourself) and post your thoughts on Cloudworks, or on your blog, via twitter (#oldsmooc_w3), or on the thread on Google Groups called Different approaches to design. The following questions may help to focus your thoughts:
- Which part/s of the design do you usually think about first when you begin a new learning design? Do you start with – the learners, the technology, learning approach, previous designs, resource constraints, time constraints, institutional strategy, or ... ?
- Where do your ideas originate? From colleagues, from conferences or events, from student data or feedback, from personal experience, from case studies, or ...?
- What difficulties do you encounter when trying to describe your design ideas to colleagues or to yourself?
Activity 2 (30 minutes): So what do ideate tools look like and how have they been used? This activity uses the OULDI ToolBox as an example of how tools can be used to support initial steps in sketching out a course. To gain an overview of these tools:
- Watch the Course Features Cards video on the Course Features Cloud: these cards were developed to help individuals or teams to think about the overall character of their course (6:31). This Cloud also has a link to the JISC Design Studio for further information and PDFs.
- Read about the Course View Map page and Activity Profile: these representations are intended to broaden the design ‘view’ beyond a focus on the syllabus and to help you think about what learning activities the student is doing. The link to the Course Map includes Excel and Word templates and a suggested design activity.
- Select one or two from this list of nineteen Case Studies and read about how the OULDI tools have been used by practitioners
Activity 3 (30 minutes): A Toolbox on Cloudworks. Take a look at this Toolbox. This Cloudscape presents a crowd-sourced list of design tools and activities: some you may already have encountered on this course or elsewhere, others may be new to you. Add to this list any tools and activities you have used or are aware of. You may also want to use or add to the Week 3 Bibsonomy page. Join in this activity to apply for the Resource Gatherer badge.
Friday
Activity 4 (15 minutes): Assembling your Toolkit: Part 1. Leicester University has been fusing together OULDI tools with tools from the established Carpe Diem programme (such as the StoryBoard activity). Watch the presentation about the 7Cs (embedded in this page and available as a downloadable PowerPoint at the bottom of the page) for an overview of how a range of tools have been selected for use in a series of activities which gradually support designers in building their conception of a design. Contribute to a discussion in the Cloud or on the OLDSMOOC Google group discussion thread The 7Cs of Learning Design as you prefer.
Activity 5 (30-60 minutes): Assembling your Toolkit: Part 2. Decide what tools/activities you want to use for imagining or describing your learning design. Select 2 or 3 tools/activities from the Toolbox Cloudscape (see activity 3) that you would like to try. In particular, you might find the Course Features, Course Map and Activity Profile Conceptual Learning Designs useful. To help make your selections think:
- Are you looking for tools and activities that challenge and disrupt the way you currently think about your course, or are you looking for tools that use language, terms or representations that you are already familiar with?
- Are you looking for tools that help you to take ‘time out’ to ideate in more detail or are you primarily interested in tools to save you time (for example, in creating representations you commonly use?)
- Which tools/activities you try and in what order is entirely up to your team, however, if you can’t decide, why not start with the Course Features Card tool/activity (see Activity 2).
Saturday, Sunday and Monday
Activity 6 (60-90 minutes): Use the tools/activities you selected in Activity 5. Make sure you understand the purpose of the tool or activity and what is trying to support you in doing. If working in teams build in time to share ideas. You have the option of doing this at the weekend (e.g. if working remotely) or on Monday (if working with a team from your institution).
Activity 7 (15 minutes): Post what you produced during Activity 6 on the Imagining the Design Cloud in Cloudworks / your blog. If you are using Twitter or Google Groups, why not tweet the URL? If you are working in a team, you may want to nominate one person to do this on the teams’ behalf.
Don’t worry if you’ve deviated from the original representation or your use of the tool or if it looks a bit messy. If you're interested, there are two side-by-side comparisons of outputs from the Course Map and Activity Profiler on p57 and p62 of this OULDI report. If you know of others, why not add them to the OLDSMOOC BibSonomy Page.
Activity 8 (15-20 minutes): Review the designs posted by at least one or two other participants (these could be in personal spaces shared via the forum or Twitter (#oldsmooc_wk3), or in the Imagining the Design Cloud, or the Sharing and Reflection Cloud, or in the relevant Cloudscapes (Course Features, Course Map, Activity Profile etc.). Provide feedback on the design Clouds colleagues have uploaded.
Activity 9 (60 minutes): CONVERGE: 12 NOON GMT Google hangout discussion. This will be a synchronous (recorded) session, which will provide an opportunity to ask questions of this week's team and reflect with others on the activities. (Please note that this event has moved from Tuesday to Wednesday).
Activity 10 (15-30 minutes): In the discussion forum thread Reflections on Week 3, or in the Sharing and Reflecting Cloud, view and reflect on the week's activity and identify the progress you have made in your own designs this week. Questions you might like to think about include:
Activity 10 (15-30 minutes): In the discussion forum thread Reflections on Week 3, or in the Sharing and Reflecting Cloud, view and reflect on the week's activity and identify the progress you have made in your own designs this week. Questions you might like to think about include:
- What are the benefits of these visual representations?
- Did they help you to think more creatively?
- What representations did you find more useful?
- Do you think it would be useful to share these views with students?
You might like to add your Action Plan to the Action Plan Cloudscape.
Optional Activities
- You may wish to revisit the Toolbox Cloudscape and try some of the additional activities listed there.
- You might wish to work through the Viewpoints Cards: Assessment and Feedback and post your completed cards back to the Cloudscape.
- You might wish to work through the Viewpoints Cards: Learner Engagement and post your completed cards back to the Cloudscape.
- You might wish to work through the Carpe Diem Storyboard and post your completed cards back to the Cloudscape.
Background reading and materials
You might like to read or watch the following resources as a background to this week's set of activities.
- Webinar: Identifying and changing key curriculum design practices
- Open University Learning Design Initiative Website (includes overview, publications, tools and resources, personal case studies, nine pilot study reports and project blog). Also blog post on the Learning Design Problem Space.
- The 7Cs of Learning Design Toolkit (Leicester University). Selected blog posts include: Current thinking on the 7Cs of Learning Design, Update on the 7Cs of Learning Design and Carpe Diem - the 7Cs of learning design
- Viewpoint Curriculum Design project (Ulster University). Also: Learner engagement Viewpoints learner engagement cards and add your completed cards to the Viewpoints Learner Engagement Cloudscape.
- Carpe Diem Story board Carpe Diem Storyboard and added your completed storyboard to the Storyboard Cloudscape.
- Conole, G. (2013), Design representations, Chapter 8 in G. Conole (2013), Designing for learning in an open world, New York: Springer. A draft of the chapter is provided as a link at the bottom of this page.
- Agostinho, S. (2011). The use of a visual learning design representation to support the design process of teaching in higher education. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 27(6), 961-978. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet27/agostinho.html
- Documenting your Learning Design
