Alongside the JISC funded learning design project I am also contributing to an EU funded project called ‘Design Practice’. It is a Leonardo transfer of innovation project with a focus on developing educators’ learning design skills.
Our role has been to develop and trial a series of training materials that can be used across cultures and educational contexts. The first of these was a ‘Using Technologies in Teaching’ or ‘Learning Design ‘Lite’ workshop, which is an adaptation of the ‘Design Challenge‘ workshops used in our JISC funded work at the OU and in our partner universities. The workshop has now been run many, many times in UK, Spain, Greece and Cyprus and it has been interesting and useful (and heartening!) to see how the workshop format has been adapted, contextualised and improved by the teacher trainers who have now taken it over, but how true to the originals the resources and representational models have remained ! The second set of materials that we have developed we have called the ‘Learning Design Training Module‘ and we are currently running it on Cloudworks for some 40 plus OU asscoiate lecturers. The module was originally conceived as a masters level ‘route-through’ the OULDI toolbox.
I am trying to stay ‘hands-off’ as eventually the module will be launched a stand-alone and unmoderated masters level OER, and we need to know whether it works in that way, but the level of reflection and discussion about the concepts of learning design generally, and contextualised learning design practice specifically, is of a very high standard and enormously thought provoking – I am desperate to put my two-pennies in! I will be facilitating a practical design workshop with these tutors on June 10th and am very much looking forward to it.
