Abstract:

The proposed presentation will detail the processes that a team of digital learning designers implemented to manage learning design in a higher education institution with large student cohorts. Written from the perspective of learning designers, the paper aims to share the design process used to support students in accessing and engaging with content. The paper will also detail the challenges inherent in developing online learning that have been magnified by the pandemic and the solutions implemented to overcome these.

Prior to the pandemic, teaching and learning was traditionally didactic or face to face, rapidly transitioning to online learning during the height of COVID-19. This required educators to move all content, activities and assessment tasks to the Learning Management System (LMS) very quickly. The role of the learning design team in this change was to collaborate with and support the content experts and educators in transitioning their pedagogy to the online context. This required the educators to re-work traditional didactic content into more “bite-sized” chunks of content and create modules that students could work through. The online modules were enriched with multimedia and interactive tools to maximise student engagement and learning and external tools were used to test student knowledge and promote collaboration which could be embedded into the LMS.

Challenges that the learning design team faced during this period included the requirement to upskill educators in the use of the LMS and the ways to provide content so that it could be created with fast turnarounds, attention to detail and minimal disruption. Solutions that were implemented in response to those challenges included co-design with other design teams as well as collaborating with the educators, widening evaluation of content prior to release to all stakeholders. The co-design approach was implemented with the purpose of enabling educators to take ownership of site maintenance and rollover in future semesters, with appropriate skills required to create content or tools with the design principles provided by the learning design teams.

These such principles included:
i) information engagement,
ii) connected participation and active learning and
iii) relevant and authentic assessment and a feed forward approach to learning.

Small teams of learning designers were allocated to individual units, tasked with designing, developing and implementing changes to units to meet the challenges of the pandemic and the switch to online learning and teaching. Perhaps unique to this context was the duration of assistance provided by the learning design team to each unit, where three cycles of design, implementation and evaluation were completed before handover of content and courses to the relevant educator. As part of this process, the sustainability of all content, activities and processes was at the forefront of the learning designer's job, along with the training provided to the educators.

Keywords:

Co-design, sustainability, learning design, pandemic, higher education, online learning, online teaching and learning, engagement, feed forward, training.