This workshop illustrates how a digital tool, the Learning Designer, facilitates a new way of designing teaching and learning. It enables teachers to: build on the work of others, adopt and adapt learning designs, analyse and test their designs, and then share their own teaching ideas and experience using the tool. The Learning Designer is one of the outputs of a three-year research project*, which investigated how to support teachers developing their design skills and knowledge in order to profit from the creative possibilities opened up by digital technologies.
Evaluations from teachers using the learning design tool demonstrated that it helps teachers in all sectors of education. The Learning Designer tool is used across the world in the exchange of knowledge when delivering formal and informal “teaching.” It is underpinned by a theoretically-informed model of learning and by empirical work with teaching practitioners, and uses Semantic Web technologies for developing this knowledge further (Charlton, Magoulas, & Laurillard, 2012; Zazani, 2012). The tool builds on the idea of teaching as a ‘design science’ and a wide range of research on learning design (Laurillard, 2012).
*Funded by the ESRC/EPSRC TLRP Technology-Enhanced Learning programm
