designing for blended learning, sharing and reuse

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Designing for blended learning, sharingand reuseIsobel Falconer a & Allison Littlejohn aa Glasgow Caledonian University , UKPublished online: 08 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Isobel Falconer & Allison Littlejohn (2007) Designing for blendedlearning, sharing and reuse, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 31:1, 41-52, DOI:10.1080/03098770601167914

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Designing for blended learning, sharing

and reuse

Isobel Falconer* and Allison LittlejohnGlasgow Caledonian University, UK

The concept of design for learning has arisen as education faces up to the implications of modern

pedagogy, student diversity, and the affordances of information and communication technologies.

This paper examines some of the benefits and issues for teachers in further and higher education

surrounding the idea of learning design and its practical implementation in blended learning. It

looks particularly at questions of documenting and representing learning designs so that they can

be communicated to others. It explores the differing requirements of representations at various

stages in the planning and sharing process, and for different communities of users, finding that

multiple perspectives on a learning design are usually necessary. However, few representations to

date have succeeded in capturing the essence of a good piece of teaching. Ways of representing

designs as dynamic processes, rather than static products, may need to be developed. The paper is

based on the outcomes of work with practising teachers during the UK Joint Information Systems

Committee (JISC)-funded Models of Practice Project, part of JISC’s Design for Learning

Programme, which runs from 2006 to 2007.

Introduction

The concept of ‘design for learning’ has arisen in the context of three institutional

challenges that currently face teachers in further and higher education: the

increasing size and diversity of the student body; an increasingly managerial

approach that evaluates education against cost, efficiency and measurable outcomes;

and the potential of new technologies to provide personalised learning and call into

question traditional ideas of the purposes of education and what constitutes

knowledge (DfES, 2001; Council for Industry and Higher Education, 2002;

Beetham & Sharpe, forthcoming).

The solution to these seemingly incompatible challenges is often sought in use of

technological tools such as virtual learning environments (VLEs) for scaleable and

flexible delivery, and for efficient sharing and reuse of teaching ideas and activities.

Yet despite substantial recent institutional investment in trying to exploit such

*Corresponding author. Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Rd,

Glasgow G4 OBA, UK. Email: [email protected]

Journal of Further and Higher Education

Vol. 31, No. 1, February 2007, pp. 41–52

ISSN 0309-877X (print)/ISSN 1469-9486 (online)/07/010041-12

# 2007 UCU

DOI: 10.1080/03098770601167914

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technologies in learning there is little sign that education has changed in any

fundamental way at the level of teacher practice (Collis & van der Wende, 2002). It

appears that the benefits of e-Learning are not sufficiently clear or easy to

communicate (Beetham, 2004). Nor are they well enough aligned with existing

institutional structures, values and rewards (Seufert & Euler, 2004).

This paper examines some of the benefits and issues for teachers in further and

higher education surrounding the idea of design for learning and its implementation

in blended learning. It is based on the outcomes of the UK Joint Information

Systems Committee (JISC)-funded Models of Practice Project, part of JISC’s

Design for Learning Programme (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name5elp_

designlearn), which runs from 2006 to 2007.

Why design for learning?

The impetus to design for learning comes from a number of directions, taking

‘design’ to mean the planning and documentation of a learning activity, session or

curriculum in advance of delivery. Where orchestration of a number of different

resources for a large class of students is involved, for example in science practical

classes, advance planning and design of the session has always been necessary

(Sanches & Valcarcel, 1999). Simpler sessions, with lower numbers or minimal

resources, have traditionally required less advance planning, enabling a flexible

response to the immediate needs of learners. Over the last two decades, however, the

rising demands of quality assurance to ‘maintain and, where possible, enhance the

quality of the learning and teaching environment’ have required that even such

simple sessions are documented, as part of formal review and validation processes.1

Recent government widening participation policies have increased the number and

diversity of students for whom equivalent learning experiences need to be provided,

requiring advance planning and design (Scott, 1995). At the same time comes the

realisation that effective learning entails a student-centred teaching approach that

fosters the skills of independent thinking, team working and enterprise required by

employers (Garrick, 1998). However, such activities need to be scaffolded in advance

so that students can be adequately briefed about the activity. Furthermore, if such

activities are to be presented flexibly, or to distance students, they probably draw

extensively on technology to support online collaboration and access to resources,

and such access needs to be specified and set up (Contreras-Castilloa et al., 2004).

However, the technologies that might enable teachers to meet these various needs

are developing and changing rapidly. A supposed benefit of learning technologies is

their potential for providing access to a wealth of knowledge and tools for students to

interact with the knowledge, the teacher and their peers. Yet teachers receive little

guidance on how to use these tools to best effect. Another reason for documenting

the design of learning activities, sessions or curricula that have proved effective is to

share and reuse practice, providing advice and guidance and increasing the efficiency

of planning (Beetham, 2004).

Furthermore, if a machine-readable language for describing learning designs

could be devised, a lot of the setup and orchestration of tools could be done

42 I. Falconer and A. Littlejohn

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automatically, relieving teachers of this burden (Masterman, 2006). A number of

such methods have been developed for the technical development community.

These include Educational Modelling Language (EML; Koper, 2001) which was

developed to describe teaching and learning interactions at a generic level. This

approach has been incorporated into the IMS Learning Design specification, a

global initiative which aims to provide a digital format for encoding, transporting

and playing learning designs (Koper et al., 2003). In the United States, the

Department of Defense developed SCORM (Shareable Courseware Object

Reference Model) which is a set of specifications and standards to enable

web-based learning systems to find, import, share and reuse learning materials in

a standard way (http://www.adlnet.gov/scorm/index.cfm). While these initiatives

primarily focus on the technical development community, a more teacher-

friendly system is LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) (http://

www.lamsinternational.com/), which enables teachers to plan activities using drag

and drop icons, and then to run them in a VLE. However, the range of activity types

and sequences possible is currently rather limited. Despite this enthusiasm for

developing a language for describing learning designs that will enable sharing and

reuse, researchers have yet to find descriptions that teachers in mainstream

education can understand and apply (Burgos & Griffiths, 2005). This reflects a

more general split in the e-Learning community between development of e-Learning

tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most

effectively (Bennett et al., 2005; Falconer & Littlejohn, 2006).

Representing learning designs

The idea of designs for learning is that they provide the guidance teachers need by

modelling good pedagogic practice, and can be shared and reused, promoting

efficiency and quality assurance.

‘Design for Learning’ may be defined as ‘designing, planning and orchestrating

learning activities as part of a learning session or programme’ (JISC, 2006). A

‘learning design’ is the outcome of this design process. Learning designs have been

known to further education teachers for a long time as ‘lesson plans’, but are

relatively unknown in higher education.

A learning design may exist purely in the head of the teacher implementing it but,

as pointed out by Vogel and Oliver (2006, p. 4), ‘in order to be comprehended by

others, designs must also be represented or articulated’. However effective a learning

design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation that

communicates the structure and purpose of the design. Efficient sharing and reuse

can only take place if the representations are effective; they must convey the

information that teachers need in a form that the teachers can understand. The issue

of representation, then, is central to the whole drive to share and reuse designs.

A learning design may be of any size and complexity, from a course down to an

individual activity. We will take it that the scope of the design is determined by the

learning objectives to be met: a design contains the activities required to meet a

Designing for blended learning, sharing and reuse 43

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learning objective (Falconer & Littlejohn, 2006). For teachers, the most common

learning designs are probably of a session lasting between one and three hours, or a

course module of a number of sessions.

Learning designs have been represented in a number of ways, for example, as

lesson plans, case studies, units of activity in a VLE, flow diagrams, or tutor notes.

However, while these representations clearly convey the ‘orchestration and planning’

of activities, there is some debate over the extent to which they communicate the

‘design’, where design is taken to imply the pedagogical intent underlying the

structure (Griffiths, 2004).

Two representation systems that have been developed through extensive

consultation with teachers, aiming to convey the generic structure and peda-

gogic intent of a design and enable sharing and reuse, are the Australian Univ-

ersities Teaching Committee (AUTC) temporal sequence system (http://www.

learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/) and the LDLite matrix (Littlejohn & Pegler, in press).

These are essentially paper-based systems and are not currently machine-readable,

but they aim to bridge the gap between teachers and technical developers.

Thus a learning design communicates more than just the sequence of activities; it

expresses also the pedagogical rationale for the relationship between activities,

resources, and the path between them. Greller (2005) has pointed out that for

teachers pedagogic intent is the primary feature of a design; it comes first, before any

attempt is made to decide upon a methodology, activity or pathway.

Documenting learning and teaching practice

Blending a number of learning activities, media and e-tools can be compared with

orchestrating a stage performance (Liber & Olivier, 2003). It is helpful to have

different types of information about the performance at different levels. As a starting

point, it is useful for teachers to have access to a short synopsis, just as they might

read on a poster or in an announcement. The purpose is to provide sufficient

information to choose between one ‘performance’ and another. This sort of

representation is essential for reuse across different stakeholders since it allows

communication about the learning design to others. It is less important for teachers

who are reusing their own designs. The synopsis defines the learning outcomes and

documents an abstraction or a pattern behind learning activities or activity

sequences.

If the synopsis seems of interest, then a teacher may want to find more detail about

an individual learning activity or activities. This is akin to a screenplay that gives

information on what happens during an activity sequence, giving details of each

activity to others. For teachers and students who are part of the performance, the

screenplay indicates what to do at each stage. This detail is usually presented as a

detailed linear document about a set of events happening in one space as a

continuous flow. An example of this type of representation is a ‘lesson plan’ which is

essentially a matrix mapping of activities along a timeline (Littlejohn & Pegler, in

press).


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Unlike a play, learning activities might not take place sequentially. It is important

to have an overall mapping of the performance—akin to a ‘director’s working docu-

ment’. This form of representation is a ‘learning design sequence’ that orchestrates

the different activities, resources and tools integrated into blended learning.

Documenting teaching practice is particularly important in blended learning,

because this form of learning involves blending a number of factors: learning

activities, media, environments (physical and electronic), synchronisation (real-time

or asynchronous activities) and pedagogical approaches (MacDonald, 2006).

Consequently, it may be the process, rather than the product, of planning and

blending that is the important element for teachers.

As part of our Mod4L study, we carried out focus group interviews with teachers

to find out the ways they plan and document teaching their courses. Our sample

group of 12 came from a variety of UK universities and colleges teaching a range of

subjects. These teachers use a range of different planning frameworks, operating at a

variety of degrees of ‘granularity’, from a whole course to an individual learning

activity. These types of representations are listed in Table 1.

Our sample group identified that the most useful representation depended on the

purpose and the user of the representation. A different representation is likely to be

selected if a teacher is reflecting on teaching practice or working within a closely knit

team, than if he or she is communicating ideas to other stakeholders, such as other

teachers, external examiners, technical or audiovisual developers. There is evidence

that teachers form informal networks to share information about teaching

approaches online. The discussion within these networks communicates much of

the ‘tacit’ information that is difficult to capture in learning designs.

Like the communication of information about a play, successful transmission of

learning design requires consideration of all the factors being blended, outlined

above, to be viewed simultaneously at a variety of levels, outlining different

perspectives. McAndrew et al. (2005) note that multiple representations may be

necessary to develop learning designs for reuse, while Masterman (2006) found that

teachers similarly use several different representations during the planning process.

In our workshop we asked participants if a combination of a rich narrative overview

pattern, a detailed lesson plan and a learning design activity sequence provided three

suitable perspectives. Their response was that lesson plans alongside patterns or

learning design sequence maps may be useful combinations, depending on the

context. However, concept maps seemed too similar to learning design sequences to

be complementary. Most importantly, representations must be useful or meaningful

to teachers in order to motivate them into documenting learning designs.

Key issues and challenges in reusing blended learning designs

Several enquiries have explored the use of representations by practitioners to

communicate and improve understanding of practice (Beetham, 2001; Sharpe et al.,

2004; Falconer et al., 2006; Littlejohn et al., 2007, in press). The challenges raised

may be considered by broadening out from personal use of designs, to institutional

and cross-sector reuse.


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Table 1. Frameworks used by teachers to plan and document teaching

Representation Description Usefulness Target users

Module plan or

master folder

Text based overview of the module. Usually

available as a ‘Word’ document or in paper

form.

Essential for quality assurance procedures such as

external assessment.

Tutors

Programme leaders

External examiners

Case study A narrative overview of a teaching and learning

situation—ranging from an entire module to a

single classroom activity.

Case studies are used to communicate ideas about

teaching practice. They are most useful when they

outline specifics about what went wrong as well as

positive outcomes.

Tutors

Course developers

Briefing

document

A narrative overview of a teaching and learning

situation, focusing on class management issues.

The briefing document is similar to the case study,

but has more of an emphasis on class management

issues, such as resourcing and timing.

Tutors

Programme leaders

External examiners

Pattern overview A rich, narrative description of a learning

activity or set of activities

Useful for communicating teaching ideas to other

tutors. The ‘pattern’ abstracts information about the

teaching approach. It gives more concise information

than the case study. Its intention is to provide an

overview at a glance.

Tutors

Course developers

Technical

developers

Contents table A list of contents of a module or a single class Useful for communicating an overview of a course

(or class) to other tutors. The ‘contents table’ focuses

less on the teaching approach and more on the

subject matter. Students can use such a list as a

course overview.

Tutors

Students

Concept map A mapping of concepts and/or learning activities The concept map can be used to communicate ideas on

learning activities and teaching approaches. It can be

used by students to help them understand the ways in

which concepts and/or activities fit together.

Tutors

Students

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Representation Description Usefulness Target users

Learning design

sequence

A sequence of learning activities The learning design sequence is similar to the concept

map. Its purpose is to orchestrate learning activities.

This is fairly straightforward where learning activities

are sequential, but becomes more complex with

learner-centred approaches, such as problem-based

learning.

Tutors

Students

Technical

developers

Storyboard A mapping of concepts and/or learning activities The storyboard is similar to the concept map, but

usually has more detail. It can be used to

communicate ideas about instantiation of specific

teaching scenarios to tutors, but may be too detailed

for students.

Tutors

Audiovisual/

instructional

developers

Lesson plan A matrix mapping learning activities against a

timescale. Lesson plans are commonly used in

Further Education.

Lesson plans map learning activities with resources.

They are highly contextualized, but do not give

information on the effectiveness of teaching

approaches – what works and what does not work in

practice.

Tutors

Table 1. Continued

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Representations for personal use (planning and personal reuse)

Even when planning for personal use, teachers use multiple representations

(Masterman, 2006), finding different forms appropriate for different stages in the

planning process. For example concept maps and other diagrams are often used for

initial organisation of ideas, while text-based accounts, often in tabular form, are

used for the final plan.

Institutions often require completion of an institutional pro forma for any course

or lesson for quality assurance purposes. However, Masterman’s findings, and the

variety of personal formats of the examples contributed by Mod4L participants,

suggest that the institutional pro forma are not useful as heuristic tools for planning.

Planning tools such as LAMS, DialogPlus (http://www.dialogplus.org/) AUTC

and the JISC pedagogic planner projects (http://phoebe-project.conted.ox.ac.uk/

cgi-bin/trac.cgi and http://www.wle.org.uk/d4l/), designed to assist teachers in

designing for learning, are beginning to appear. Mod4L participants made a

distinction between representations that they could use to document an existing

design, and planner tools that would help them create new designs or modify

existing ones. The representations might be the same in each, but a planner tool

would need to provide support and guidance as to what was likely to be effective in

practice. This might be by drag and drop options, by some sort of hidden algorithm

that made suggestions, or by a narrative description.

Challenges in developing such planning tools include establishing the processes

involved in planning and the variety of entry points at which teachers customarily

start planning, use of representations that teachers find heuristically useful, and use

of vocabulary that is meaningful to teachers in their context. For example, a one-

hour teaching session may be a ‘lesson’, a ‘seminar’, a ‘lecture’, a ‘workshop’, a

‘practical’, etc., and the terminology may become even more confused if the session

is moved to an asynchronous online environment and spreads over a week.

Representing for institutional reuse

Many further education institutions require staff to contribute their learning designs

for institutional sharing and reuse. The compilation of ‘master folders’, intended to

contain all the information necessary for another lecturer to step in and take over a

class, is common.

When documenting for reuse within an institution, the issues of multiple

representations are similar to those for personal planning, although the processes

represented will be different. Instead of initial organisation of ideas, for example, an

overview of the structure of the design will be necessary. Where a concept map may

have been appropriate for the former, a temporal sequence such as the AUTC

system might be better for the latter.

The learning designs also have to be meaningful to the different communities

within the institution; they have to be in an appropriate format and convey the

required information, and this is likely to be different, for example, for teachers,

managers, and technical support staff. For example, a teacher implementing a design


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for a lesson needs to know timings for the sequence of activities, whereas managers

do not need detailed timings, but do want to know how it fits the rest of the

curriculum. Attempts to fulfil all these needs in a single representation become so

detailed that they cease to be useful.

However, the differing types of description necessary for reuse raise the issue of

teachers’ time and motivation. It takes time to document and describe a learning

design so that someone else can reuse it, especially if it has to be described in a

number of different ways, representing different information in each. To a certain

extent this is required in many further education colleges, in compilation of the

master folders. Things are very different in the higher education sector where

institutional and cultural attitudes to personal intellectual property preclude similar

attempts at sharing designs, and there is little institutional reward for doing so.

Representing for sector-wide reuse

Issues of time and motivation become even more apparent when considering sharing

and reuse between many institutions. But a more fundamental question is, can it be

done effectively? Is an effective learning design still effective when transferred to a

new context? Furthermore, how may a teacher judge whether a reusable learning

design might be effective in their own context?

Even with multiple representations, capturing the essence of a learning design

seems problematic. Even in the case of master folders, where the context is constant,

Mod4L participants suggested that achieving a useful documentation was extremely

difficult and no one had found a set of representations that they felt was satisfactory.

Teaching style, position, and learner needs all have a contingent effect on

implementation of the design.

These problems are magnified when context also changes. Sharpe et al. (2004)

suggest that to be effective, representations need to be ‘owned’ by, and meaningful

within, each particular teacher community. In addition, they should be the focus of

active collaboration and interaction, and should be richly contextualised.

Contextualisation, collaboration and interaction help teachers gain insights into

the ‘wiggling around’ that Mod4L participants suggest bonds the components of the

static design together, and that constitutes the essence of teaching. In this sense, they

implied that while a static design can ensure that the teaching environment,

comprising activity structures, supports and resources, is put in place, they cannot

ensure that the intent of the reused design is realised.

This finding is similar to that of Vogel and Oliver (2006) when investigating use of

VLEs (such as Blackboard and Moodle) as design tools. They found that:

[teachers] barely touched on the process and act of design, but rapidly slid off into

insights about the experience of running the designs. … course area concepts and

contents develop incrementally, continuously and reactively - according to tacit

principles which are difficult for teachers to articulate in retrospect. (p. 20)

When it comes to running a reused design, or indeed any lesson designed in

advance, rapid decisions may need to be made to meet the immediate context, such


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as different or unexpected learner needs, interruptions to the lessons, etc. Yet

flexibility and contingency planning seldom find a place in representations of

learning designs, and documenting such variations adds to the burden on teachers’

time.

Many other things that Mod4L participants wanted to know about when assessing

designs for their own possible use, such as rationale, assessment policies, teacher

reflection and evaluation, and student feedback, are also poorly covered in most

representations.

While documenting designs for sharing and reuse place burdens on teachers’ time,

equivalent or greater savings might be achieved if setup and even running of designs

could be done by machine. If designs that use technological tools are to be shared

and reused from one institution to another, then they also need to be described in an

interoperable, machine-readable, way. But the possibly competing requirements of

machine-readable representations and teacher-understandable representations have

yet to be resolved. For example, the richly contextualised case studies appreciated by

teachers do not lend themselves to easy sharing and reuse in an online or blended

environment.

We have also noted the need for teachers to be able to modify a design as they

implement it, to meet immediate learner needs and contingencies. This applies

equally to computer-run activities. The experience of Mod4L participants supports

Britain’s (2004) call for learning design tools that support differentiation, branching

and looping workflow, and also the findings of Masterman (2006); Vogel and Oliver

(2006), and the Learning Activity Design in Education project (www.elframework.

org/refmodels/ladie) that tools should allow for teachers to modify the design during

run time.

Closely related to the ability to edit designs during run time is the issue of

representing designs as an active and ongoing process, rather than a static product of

the design process. This has been noted by Vogel and Oliver (2006), Burgos (2005),

and Taylor and Richardson (2001), who warn of the dangers of disenfranchising

teachers and perpetuating conservative practices if teachers are expected to operate

in ‘recycling’ rather than ‘discovery’ mode. Representing designs as active, and

enabling development and communication around them by a community of

practice, emerges also from the discussions of Mod4L participants as a means of

encouraging and supporting sharing and reuse. This observation is one that LAMS

and DialogPlus try to implement, with varying degrees of success, through their

websites. Most repositories of resources, however, seem so far to have failed to

establish communities of users (Margaryan et al., 2006). This is an urgent issue that

may be related to the problem of representing design as an active process.

Discussion

The idea of design for learning offers practical benefits to teachers in terms of

improved teaching quality and efficiency. However, before these benefits can be

realised there are a number of issues to overcome. The issues can largely be classified


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as institutional and representational. This paper has concentrated mainly on the

representational ones:

N Representations to meet user needs. Representations need to be meaningful and

useful to different communities of users. Differing groups, for example teachers

and technical developers, may need very different forms of representation.

N Multiple perspectives are necessary. Even a single user generally requires multiple

perspectives suited to differing processes during planning or adaptation of a

design.

N Representations may be difficult to construct. Few representations to date have

succeeded in capturing the essence of a good piece of teaching. Ways of

representing designs as dynamic processes, rather than static products, may need

to be developed.

These issues are the focus of active research at present and the next few years are

likely to see the emergence of user-friendly learning design and design running tools.

Notes

1. Examples of quality assurance procedures can be reviewed at http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/.

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designing for blended learning, sharing and reuse

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