Document created for Blended Learning Essentials, funded by Ufi Charitable Trust. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

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Blended Learning Essentials: Embedding Practice

The Learning Designer: Criteria for an effective learning design

Here is an overview of features to consider when creating a learning design. The criteria should be useful for

guiding the process of creating your own design, and for reviewing someone else’s.

This is a brief guideline. There will be other criteria you want to include as you reflect on the creative learning

design process, and we expect that the community will gradually develop a preferred set of criteria.

We propose four basic criteria that focus on: test of learning outcomes achieved, alignment of design

features, quality of feedback and use of technology.

Test: Is there a way for the teacher to judge whether learning outcomes are met?

How can the teacher test this? Some activities will demonstrate what learners can do, so that teachers can

how they’re doing. For example, teachers can monitor discussion activities in forums, or listen to points made

in class discussions; and they can look at the evidence from Practice, Investigate and Collaborate activities. But

the 'Produce' learning type is where the learners are asked to express what they know or can do. So this is

often the activity that acts best as the 'assessment' the teacher can use to judge whether the intended

outcomes have been met.

Alignment: is there constructive alignment between outcomes, activities and assessment?

The principle of constructive alignment1 simply says that the learning outcomes must fit the learning activities,

which must fit the assessment. The assessment, or test, is the activity that demonstrates the degree to which

the learners have achieved the learning outcomes. Every learning design should include aims, outcomes, and

a sequence of training or teaching-learning activities (TLAs). It should also include the means for the teacher

to test whether the outcomes have been met, so the ‘test’ activity must align with both the intended learning

outcomes and TLAs.

1 Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 347-364.

Document created for Blended Learning Essentials, funded by Ufi Charitable Trust. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

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Feedback: Do learners receive sufficient formative feedback from peers, the teacher, or the computer?

Formative feedback is used during the session or lesson to inform both the tutor and the learners about their

progress towards achieving the learning outcomes. Formative feedback helps the learner improve on what

they have done, and can be:

Peer-to-peer feedback

Teacher feedback

Extrinsic feedback (e.g. multiple choice quiz, right/wrong, hints or comments)

Intrinsic feedback from a digital program (e.g. writing a program and seeing what happens when you

run it; performance on an educational game; making a decision in a role-play simulation and seeing the

result; performance of a system simulation in response to learner input; results from a data analysis

tool)

Intrinsic feedback is a powerful form, the closest to the experience of working with real tools and systems. But

it is also less common in blended learning, as these types of program tend to be more expensive to develop.

Technology: Is there appropriate use of technology to enhance learning?

If the learning design is blended, rather than purely conventional, then we should expect to see digital

technology in use. The 'appropriate' use of technology means, for example, that learning technologies are

used, for example, to:

improve learners’ experience in terms of engagement and learning outcomes, not "for the sake of

technology"

improve the staff : student ratio

support independent learning

It should not be used just for the sake of using it. There should be a clear benefit to learners and/or the tutor.

Other criteria

These are some key basic criteria, but you will also have your own criteria for good pedagogic design, as you

design and review other designs.

Pedagogical innovation

Why should we encourage 'pedagogical innovations'? As new technologies bring new opportunities both

online and in the classroom that were not possible before, we need to rethink our pedagogies to make best

use of these innovations. That requires the time and willingness to experiment, and the boldness to fail and to

Document created for Blended Learning Essentials, funded by Ufi Charitable Trust. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

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learn from these failures.

To assist this process, the Learning Designer (http://learningdesigner.org), which is free and open to all, was

built with the aim of inviting teachers and trainers from all sectors to build their collective knowledge of good

learning designs in a collective shared store of technological pedagogic knowledge.