Importance of Learning Design

Learning design is a process that encompasses the thoughtful planning of a learner’s journey, constructing that journey, delivering it in some form and, finally, reflecting and reviewing on the outcomes.

It doesn't matter if you deliver 90% of your syllabus from the podium, or employ a primarily online mode of delivery, or perhaps use a mix of approaches, how you shape your students' learning experience can have an enormous impact on how your learners engage with your subject and ultimately, how well they grade. Learning design can also give you the opportunity to think critically and reflectively about how you approach teaching and so, in this sense, learning design can be of great value to your own development. 

Learning design helps us consider, explore and act on all aspects of the tutor / learner experience, including key components such as:

• What would we like our learners to know by the end of the module?
• How / where will the learning take place, online, offline, both?
• How will we be interacting with our learners?
• Will our module be assessed? If so, how?

Fortunately, there are a number of models and approaches that provide us with helpful scaffolds on which we can design and build our learning.

We will be exploring some of these in the next section.