Abstract:

Individuals faced with barriers such as distance, financial strain, or community resistance to higher education may find it challenging to recognise the benefits of undertaking tertiary studies. They may perceive university as a place that is not for them and question whether the knowledge and skills acquired through higher education would be useful or relevant to their lives. To effectively engage these potential students, learning designers must understand the challenges faced by their target audiences and follow guidelines which inform and then appropriately shape the development of educational content.

In 2022 and 2023, the Digital Learning Team at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University Library undertook a government-funded project to develop an Open Educational Resource (OER) which would engage learners from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in higher education. This resource, Learning Lab Contextualised Content (LLCC), was designed to support foundation-level, multidisciplinary skills and expand educational aspirations for learners residing in regional and remote areas of Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, and individuals from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds.

During the initial stages of the project, research was conducted to establish principles and address key questions:
1. Who are the target audiences and what barriers do they face to accessing and succeeding in higher education?
2. How can we encourage members of the target audiences to view higher education as an aspirational goal?

Having established a number of barriers to accessing higher education, our team considered how the LLCC project could contribute to mitigating these barriers, and the values that should inform the learning design. From this foundation, four guiding principles for the project were established: relevance, representation, reliability, and reassurance.

These evidence-based principles were integrated into the LLCC’s learning design storyboards and content development process, allowing the team to effectively work towards the project’s primary aims. The principles provided a consistent and coherent framework for learning design, helping to enhance the quality of the project by serving as a reference point for evaluating, refining, and justifying decisions, and thus ensuring the content would resonate with and support the target audiences.

This paper discusses the development of the guiding principles that shaped the creation of the LLCC resource. It explores the audience analysis, the formulation of the principles, their implementation, and their potential value to other projects. By sharing this process, this paper aims to provide insight and serve as a resource for teams seeking to create learning content to help build equity in education.

Keywords:

Higher education, learning design, open educational resources, e-learning, equity and inclusion, guiding principles.