The discipline of Learning Design incorporates many skills and a broad understanding of education. It draws on project management skills, communication skills, and the best human development approaches research offers. It’s a discipline that rewards maturity in your skill set and maturity in your judgment. It’s an art that respects science and data. It’s enormous in scope. Here, you find practitioners of every stripe - artists, teachers, scientists, and engineers (Wagner, E. 2011, 35).
Our personal definition of a thing typically emphasizes what we appreciate most about it. My definition of Learning Design hinges on “struggle” and “balance.”
Edward S. Corwin famously described the US Constitution as “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.” Corwin’s observation emphasized the tension between Congress and the Presidency in setting the course of American foreign policy. Similarly, Learning Design is an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing learning.
Creating, delivering, and supporting a learning environment is a struggle. We balance time, cost, and quality in curriculum development. We balance instructor interests against learner interests. We balance business interests against educational goals. The technology platforms we deploy are based on striking the right balance between features, performance, and total cost of ownership. With balance, the learning environment will succeed. Maintaining that balance is the perennial struggle of Learning Design (Wagner, E. 2011, 34).
Technology is the practical expression of the Learning Design in any educational system. The stronger the unifying design, the more focused the technology tools will be. Technology is not a substitute for sound learning design. Many organizations purchase a learning management system based on its industry reputation rather than the goals specified by that organization’s learning design team. The shiny new technology solution supersedes the learning design process (Wagner, E. 2011, 35).
Technology is most valuable when it has a narrowly defined mission—the more focused the application, the more performant the technology. In e-learning settings, technology should be customized for a specific environment and goals. It should have few outside dependencies and be maintained in a way that promotes long-term stability. Web-based e-learning platforms battling aging jQuery libraries illustrate my dependency warning. Python frameworks caught in the version 2 to version 3 upgrade debacle illustrate what happens when long-term stability is not prioritized in maintenance.
Technology must be accessible to be relevant. A key concept in making educational environments accessible is empathic design (Gronseth et al., 2021, 22). In the early 2000s, ATutor was one of only a handful of open-source LMS products that prized accessibility and achieved WCAG AAA status. Adopting ATutor as our delivery vehicle within the Oklahoma vocational education system ensured all Oklahomans could access our courses. This was consistent with Oklahoma law and the goals of the Oklahoma CareerTech system.
The struggle for balance in technology revolves around simplicity more than anything else. I strive to allow only the complexity required to achieve the educational goal. Everything else is stripped away, and nothing is implemented simply because “that’s what everyone does.” Simplicity improves performance and eliminates points of failure.
Balance in the context of Learning Design is the art of developing stable relationships between opposing groups or forces within a project. Instructors and students both feel the system addresses their needs. The system operates within a reasonable budget and hits reasonable revenue targets.
Struggle in the context of Learning Design is recognizing that learning frameworks are complex and require ongoing effort. If you expect a struggle, you are neither shocked nor appalled when building a learning environment becomes challenging. You can prepare to persevere, and maintaining your motivation in the long run is a crucial determiner of success.
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| Månsson C., 2019, A Stack of Four Balanced Stones, JPG |
Simple stacked stones provide an excellent visual representation of the principles of balance, struggle, and simplicity in Learning Design. Each concern or stakeholder is placed in a balanced position with respect to the others. Strong forces like gravity, and the physical bonds that make each stone solid are at work in this stack. These forces struggle against each other but settle into equilibrium. Simplicity is key. If we begin to hang additional things off any stone we disrupt the balance.
References
Edwin S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 1787-1957, 5th rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 201.
Wagner, E. (2011). The Journal of Applied Instructional Design, 1(1), 33–37
Gronseth, S. L., Michela, E., & Oluchi Ugwu, L. (2021). Designing for Diverse Learners. In Design for Learning: Principles, Processes, and Praxis (pp. 21-39). Edtech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/id/designing_for_diverse_learners