Learning design – making practice explicit

New technologies have immense potential for learning, but the sheer variety possible also creates challenges for learners in terms of navigating through an increasingly complex digital landscape and for teachers in terms of how to design and support learning interventions. How can learners and teachers make informed decisions about what technologies to use in the design and support of learning activities? This presentation will consider this question and present a new methodology for design – 'learning design', which aims to shift the creation and support of learning from what has traditionally been an implicit, belief-based practice to one that is explicit and design based. Learning design research at the Open University, UK has included the development of a set of conceptual design views, a tool for visualising designs (CompendiumLD) and a social networking site, for sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas and designs (Cloudworks). An overview of this work will be provided, along with a discussion of the perceived benefits of this new approach to educational design

Stakeholder engagement in water governance as social learning: lessons from practice

The OECD Principles on Water Governance set out various requirements for stakeholder engagement. Coupled with conceptualizations of social learning, this article asks how we define and enact stakeholder engagement and explores the actual practice of engagement of stakeholders in three fields of water governance. The results suggest that a key consideration is the purpose of the stakeholder engagement, requiring consideration of its ethics, process, roles and expected outcomes. While facilitators cannot be held accountable if stakeholder engagement ‘fails’ in terms of social learning, they are responsible for ensuring that the enabling conditions for social learning are met

The Learning Edge: Supporting Student Success in a Competency-Based Learning Environment

State by state, our country is revamping our education system to ensure that each and every one of our young people is college and career ready. Over two-thirds of our states have adopted policies that enable credits to be awarded based on proficiency in a subject, rather than the one-size-fits-all seat-time in a classroom. Now states such as Maine and New Hampshire are taking the next step in establishing competency based diplomas in which students are expected to demonstrate that they can apply their skills and knowledge. To ensure high-quality competency education, in 2011 one hundred innovators created a working definition to guide the field. This paper delves into the fourth element of the definition: Students receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual learning needs. Through a series of interviews and site visits, an understanding of how support in a competency-based school differs from traditional approaches emerged. Learning in a competency-based environment means pushing students and adults to the edge of their comfort zone and competence -- the learning edge. Common themes that were drawn from the wide variety of ways schools support students became the basis for the design principles introduced here. It is essential to pause and understand the importance of timely, differentiated support. Our commitment to prepare all of our young people for college and careers demands that we be intentional in designing schools to effectively meet the needs of students of all races, classes, and cultures. It also demands our vigilance in challenging inequity. There is a risk in competency education -- a risk that learning at one's own pace could become the new achievement gap and that learning anywhere/anytime could become the new opportunity gap. Therefore, our goal in writing this paper is to provide ideas and guidance so that innovators in competency education can put into place powerful systems of supports for students in order to eradicate, not replicate, the inequities and variability in quality and outcomes that exist in our current system. Please consider this paper as an initial exploration into what it means to provide support for the individual learning needs of students. It is designed to generate reflection, analysis, and feedback

Scaling Success: Lessons from Adaptation Pilots in the Rainfed Regions of India

"Scaling Success" examines how agricultural communities are adapting to the challenges posed by climate change through the lens of India's rainfed agriculture regions. Rainfed agriculture currently occupies 58 percent of India's cultivated land and accounts for up to 40 percent of its total food production. However, these regions face potential production losses of more than $200 billion USD in rice, wheat, and maize by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Unless action is taken soon at a large scale, farmers will see sharp decreases in revenue and yields.Rainfed regions across the globe have been an important focus for the first generation of adaptation projects, but to date, few have achieved a scale that can be truly transformational. Drawing on lessons learnt from 21 case studies of rainfed agriculture interventions, the report provides guidance on how to design, fund and support adaptation projects that can achieve scale

The teacher as action researcher : Using technology to capture pedagogic form

The paper argues that we make best use of learning technologies if we begin with an understanding of educational problems, and use this analysis to target the solutions we should be demanding from technology. The focus is to address the issue from the perspective of teachers and lecturers – the 'teaching community', and to consider how they could become the experimental innovators and reflective practitioners who will use technology well. Teachers could become 'action researchers', collaborating to produce their own development of knowledge about teaching with technology. For this to be possible, they must be able to share that knowledge, and the paper proposes the use of an online learning activity management system (LAMS) as a way of capturing and sharing the pedagogic forms teachers design. An action research approach, like all research, needs a theoretical framework from which to challenge practice, and paper shows how teachers could use the Conversational Framework to design and test an optimally effective learning experience. Examples of 'generic' learning designs illustrate how such approach can help the teaching community rethink their teaching, collectively, and embrace the best of conventional and digital methods. In this way they will be more likely to harness technology to the needs of education, rather than simply search for the problems to which the latest technology is a solution

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c