Learning Design in Higher Education: Building Communities of Practice

Introduction

Learning design has become a discipline widely used in Higher Education (Olney et al., 2021; Conole & Wills, 2013; Dalziel et al., 2016) and there exist a number of frameworks and associated tools for learning design, such as those described by the Jisc learning design family tree (Jisc, 2018). Learning design provides a descriptive framework for the planning of teaching and learning and the conditions under which those activities are performed, either online or in the classroom by the teacher and the learners (Conole, 2007; Dalziel, 2016; Masterman, 2013). Goodyear (2015) argues that a greater focus on the design and planning phase of teaching can improve the quality of higher education through the creation of more engaging and active learning opportunities for students.

Michos and Hernández-Leo (2018) suggest that there is a sociocultural aspect to the learning design process which relates to how individual teachers work with others and the wider community. There is an emphasis on reaching a shared understanding between those involved in the process, often through visualisation of designs. These designs can then be shared with others through tools such as Learning Designer (Laurillard et al., 2018; UCL Knowledge Lab, 2021) or other online collaborative spaces. Persico and Pozzi (2015) emphasise the role of learning design CoPs in helping educators to make better informed design choices.

With the challenges imposed by COVID-19, learning design has become an instrumental discipline to ensure quality of education design and delivery in higher education institutions. However, very few CoPs have been established offering peer-to-peer professional development and support activities in this sector (Clement et al., 2016). The Learning Design Bootcamp, which started in 2019 (Toro-Troconis et al., 2021), is a notable example. Another is the Learning Design Cross-Institutional Network (LD-CIN, 2021), which up until just before the first COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom (UK) in March 2020 was holding regular meetings where practitioners from the UK and beyond could meet and learn from each other.

Practice is considered as “a set of frameworks, ideas, tools, information, styles, language, stories, and documents” (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 29). Three structural elements are created within CoPs, summarised as mutual engagement (how and what people do together as part of practice), joint enterprise (a set of problems and topics that they care about), and shared repertoire (the concepts and artifacts that they create) (Pyrko et al., 2017). When engaging in a learning design process, practitioners need to be supported by people with whom they can identify; changing their practice requires learning through reflection, informal learning and peer-supported learning.

Important dimensions of a CoP are “legitimate peripheral participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) whereby newcomers learn practice through a kind of ‘apprenticeship’, thus developing their identity as practitioners over time. Pyrko et al. (2017) refer to the process of knowledge-sharing and collaboration that takes place in CoPs as ‘thinking together.’ As the case studies illustrate, this aspect of Bootcamp participation has been particularly valuable for institutional teams, and, in conjunction with the CoDesignS Learning Design Framework (CoDesignS, 2020), has helped institutions to develop their own learning design strategies.