Linking Learning Across Space and Time: Learning Design for Better Student Outcomes
If you speak to any experienced higher education educator, they will tell you that it’s the curriculum and the way it’s taught that makes all the difference to the learning experience of students, who are living increasingly complex lives, making studying an even smaller part of their daily lives. Now more than ever, we need to design learning that is fit for purpose. We need to think about Learning Design.
MacNeill and Beetham (2022) provide this definition for learning design:
"By learning design, we mean defining how learning will be supported within each module or unit: the activities, tools and technologies, core content, class sessions and group types, mode(s) of participation, assignments and assessments, and opportunities for interaction and feedback".
In some cases, the quality assurance mechanisms when courses or programmes are validated or re-validated are paper-based experiences, far removed from the day-to-day experiences of educators in the classroom. If you happen to be in an institution where this is the case, this short article will give you some practical advice on how to think about your students and curriculum, including what you might do, to enable a better learning experience and hopefully better student outcomes.
Student Personas
What is your typical student on your course like? What’s their age and background, are they commuting or living in halls or nearby? Do they work part-time (many students do, due to the cost of living in the UK)? What job(s) will your students typically go into?
These questions might be difficult to answer depending on your context. However, being aware of these factors will allow you to design curricula that meets the learning needs of your students.
Designing Together for Student Success
There is a lot of talk in Universities about Student Success, especially submitting assessments first time and achieving high marks. Designing Learning with relevant stakeholders is key to that success. Get to know your Learning Developers, Learning Technologists, Careers Consultants and Subject Librarians and your alumni and invite them to co-design the curricula with you. The addition of alumni, who could be paid advisers, allows you to build on the student personas you initially created, for a truly student-centred design and keep a meaningful relationship with your alumni, an added benefit to this approach.
The professional services staff may have insights into the types of queries they receive, which when designed into the curricula, often around practising assessments and getting educator and peer feedback will help students to know what good looks like and what to do to improve. This will hopefully increase submissions first time and reduce some queries to professional services. Inviting professional services colleagues at key times in a module or course is also a good idea, to make students aware of the services offered and increase their chances of better marks. Co-design in this way has multiple benefits but is still uncommon in many universities, where there is a strong module identity for the educator, compared to a strong course identity for the student (Toro-Tronconis et al, 2021).
Linking Learning Across Time and Space: Before, During and After a Session
A good analogy for your module, course or programme is a journey that your students have to go on. You are their guide along the way, facilitating their learning, through providing information, activities and asking them questions. Building on the analogy of a journey, it needs to be a continuous one, so the idea of linking activities before, during and after a learning session is critical.
There are many approaches to this, but this City, University of London blog post by Thomas Hanley, Senior Learning Designer, illustrates how you might do this. City’s Digital Learning Design Service uses Professor Diana Laurillard’s 6 activity types. There are many learning design models and patterns you can use. If you are interested in other learning design approaches, then Jisc’s Beyond Blended Post-Pandemic Curriculum and Learning Design Report is a good place to start.
Design activities with constructive alignment in mind. In summary this is when intended learning outcomes, written with Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs, define learning activities, that in turn incorporate assessment tasks that demonstrate intended learning outcomes. If the intended learning outcome says ‘Explain …’ then design an activity where on completion students can explain.
Scaffold your activities, think like a novice and ask yourself what your students need. Introduce the activity, does it need a warm-up or exemplar? Are there clear instructions? How much time should a student spend completing the activity?.
Think about pre- and post-support for your activities. For example, if you want students to read a journal article, and if the article is long, and the students are new, then pre-support might be to share a resource on skim reading.
Post-session support might be to reflect on a few questions, as a result of reading the article, and share in a forum on the VLE. This way there is a flow to the learning across time and space.
When thinking of learning, educators often go to synchronous learning first, a live lecture, webinar, or seminar as many experienced when taking their in-person teaching online during the Covid-19 pandemic with mixed results. It’s worth thinking about when you are not present and scaffolding asynchronous learning with good signposting. It doesn’t have to be a long activity before or after a session you want students to do – it could be posting a reflection, replying to a discussion board topic, writing 250 words on what they learnt in the session, or doing a short quiz on the VLE.
The Asynchronous Cookbook has many further practical ideas. Designing learning in this way also meets the Office for Students B3 Conditions (Continuation, completion and progression) for higher-quality education and better student outcomes.
Evaluating the impact of your Learning Design
When evaluating your learning design, this simple framework, the ‘4C Lens’ by Andrew Wright and Jannah Aljafri (2020) can be a helpful tool. The word episode below can be used when designing a teaching session, a lecture, seminar, workshop, lab or so on.
The four ‘C’s are:
● Clarity - are the instructions clear? Are the visuals clear?
● Consistency - are the terminologies used consistent? Is there a consistent flow?
● Cohesion - Is constructive alignment implemented? Does the episode flow well?
● Care - do students feel supported? What are they doing outside the episode?
It’s also worth thinking about the following areas:
● Where might there be opportunities to test something before it goes live?
● What opportunities are there to build into the student activities something that will help with evaluation? e.g. a formative assessment, practice quiz, encourage students to post in a forum. Each of these would then give them something they could measure engagement with.
● What analytics are available to you in the learning technology tools you use (e.g. the VLE)?
● Does any of that impact on your chosen approach?
Taking these practical approaches will improve the structure and quality of learning offered to students and hopefully help them achieve the best learning outcomes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the key to enhancing the learning experience lies in a thoughtful and purposeful curriculum design that resonates with the modern student. By embracing learning design, educators can ensure that each module supports student success through well-defined activities. Understanding student personas is fundamental, allowing educators to tailor the curriculum to meet the diverse needs of their students. Collaboration with various stakeholders, including alumni and professional services, enriches the design process and fosters a student-centered approach. Linking learning activities before, during, and after sessions creates a seamless educational journey, while constructive alignment ensures that learning outcomes are consistently met. Evaluating the impact of learning design through the 4C Lens framework—clarity, consistency, cohesion, and care—provides valuable insights for continuous improvement. By implementing these strategies, educators can create a dynamic and supportive learning environment that not only enhances student engagement but also leads to higher achievement and better educational outcomes.
