The JISC Design for Learning programme held an unusual event on 23rd October, and took forth the findings (amongst many others) the following day to an invited group of learning and teaching practice experts.

The first days ˜Design Bash was targeted towards projects within the programme to explore the opportunities for sharing their project outputs, which included many varied learning designs.
See Sheilas write up of the Design Bash for more information about the activities on the day. The Support Project for the programme is managed by CETIS and their experience of the successful CETIS Codebashes inspired the format of the day (i.e. ˜get them all together in one room and see if the stuff works)

As you can imagine, there were many common issues emerging, and these were presented along with brief overviews of each project, to the ˜Learning and Teaching Practice Experts Group meeting the following day with the view that they could advise on how to take forward the findings of the programme, ideas for dissemination and wider issues of how to take forward the outputs and outcomes into the e-learning programme. (i.e. where does it all fit, how can we use this work, what shall we fund next?)

Some of the emerging issues are summarised below (and will be discussed in a separate report.) Several are unsurprising and echoed by many similar initiatives, nonetheless they are worthy of consideration and it could be argued that in order for elearning to be successful many need to be addressed. Other issues are more specific to the world of learning design, yet are similar to debates around sharing and reuse that are familiar eg with Learning Objects (motivation, cultural change, contextualisation etc)

• Outputs dictated by institution & context
• How to make various designs etc as findable/ meaningful/ contextualised/ scalable as possible
• Balance between providing structure and freedom
• Import and export “ needs to be a 2 way process
• ˜skeleton Learning Designs may be needed
• Reflective practitioners, what about the rest?
• Re-thinking pedagogy?
• VLE as focus of elearning activity “ constrains institutional support
• Need tools for learners to drive their learning
• How technology changes the learner and teacher role within traditional classroom settings
• How designs are described to enable disaggregation to allow for sharing and repurpose
• Looking at macro and micro levels of learning design – and all those in between
• Process is important “ how to capture that?
• Interoperability, IMS LD, mapping between designs
• Pedagogic Planners “ need further links with each other and with all projects across the Programme.
• Programme needs to link in with other learning design initiatives (global)

The experts provided invaluable reflections and feedback about the projects and the overall programme, and a wider perspective on the needs of the community and how to take the work forward. It was evident that there is a need to find ways of making potential of projects actually convincing to practitioners and institutions. It was suggested that we build on existing and improve it, to clarify where we are going now rather than set off in a perhaps tangential direction. The focus may be to work with practitioners to see how learning design (and learning design tools, approaches etc) fit in with institutional needs and embedding them into practice. JISC are open to ideas and suggestions for future directions and feedback from the day is still being synthesised “ more to come¦