The Complexity of Learning Design

I’ve been thinking about learning design as a profession, the kind of work it is, and what we do, and trying to map it to the domains of the Cynefin Framework. This is to help explain what we do as a team to others in the institution and to look at what structures would support […]

Design at Scale

I presented Tuesday, 6th December, at Ascilite22 about some of the work I’ve been leading at the University of Adelaide. It was a Pecha Kucha session, so there was not a massive amount of time to go into depth about the work, so I thought I’d put together something to accompany the slides and provide […]

A Learning Design System

Recently I had the pleasure of presenting with one of my team members about some of the work we’ve been doing. It was to a local UX group, Design for Humans, and it was an excellent opportunity to share our work. I’m not going to run through the presentation here, but I did want to […]

Design is Scale

I’ve just been listening to the We Are Open podcast interviewing Brian Alexander. During the discussion Brian talks about the idea of scale and needing to move between the micro through to the meso. This is something I’ve been fascinated in for quite some time and I’ve looking for words and terminologies to kind of […]

Working without tools

Learning Design is a relatively new field. I’m not sure if it’s a discipline, or even if its defined as profession just yet. There are certainly aspects of it being both a discipline and a profession, but there is one clear thing missing — tools. Having spent years working adjacent to the design of learning, […]

The Principles of Agile Learning Design

So far I’ve given you a bit of an origin story for Agile Learning Design and spoken a little bit about the Design itself. The next thing I thought I’d do was lay out some principles for Agile Learning Design. This post is more manifesto than explanation — some of it definitely needs to be […]

The Design in Learning Design

Before I get into some of the meatier discussion around Agile Learning Design I want to take a quick detour and have a quick chat about learning design. Without a dedicated degree or qualification it seems that learning designers come into the profession via two streams – education or technical. I came to it from […]

An Origin Story for Agile Learning Design

I’m going to try and keep going with the writing. Rather than aim for the masterful tome, I’m just going to approach it as a series of connected pieces. For me I just need to externalise some of my thoughts and see what sticks. I’ll come back and refine things later. I want to talk […]

Designing the Learning Experience: Activities & Patterns

Thinking about the design of experiences and how a focus on activities might work with the development of a pattern language to aid learning design.

We design learning.

For the past few months, I’ve spent a bit of time working towards a definition of learning design that works for me. Definitions are really hard to do. They sound easy, but once you start to unpack things it gets quite difficult, very quickly. I don’t know if I’ve got my definition sorted yet, but […]