London Pedagogy Planner: Design for Learning
The London Pedagogy Planner (LPP) is a prototype for a collaborative online planning and design tool that supports lecturers in analysing, developing and sharing learning designs. LPP is based on a developing model of the components involved in learning design (e.g. learning outcomes, topics, teaching methods), and the critical relationships between them. As a decision tool, it makes the pedagogical design explicit as an output from the process, capturing it for testing, redesign, reuse and adaptation by the originator, or by others.
Executive Summary
The aims of the project were to:
- support lecturers in HE and FE in the diagnostic process of identifying learner needs, designing learning activities, and assessing learning outcomes
- enable effective and innovative use of learning technologies within existing institutional contexts
- understand the requirements of the academic community who wish to build and share pedagogically innovative materials
The project has attempted to meet these aims by exploiting the opportunities offered by digital technology to develop a Pedagogy Planner with practitioners.
The LPP project has reviewed and identified several ways of representing learning designs, and the decision-making process, in the form a support tool (see San Diego et al., 2007 for details). We have adopted an iterative user-oriented approach to collecting development requirements in order to embrace the different approaches teachers use to think about learning designs. The development of the learning design support prototype incorporates the following features:
- planning at different levels of granularity – activity, session, module, programme
- customisation of terminologies to adapt to local institutional requirements
- consideration of teacher time and learner time as significant parameters for learning design
- updating of information in all stages after changes made in any one stage
- externalising decisions made in designing through visual representations
The agile method of development included iterative phases of design, development and evaluation (Boyle, 2008). A technical team responsible for the development of the tool met regularly to discuss design issues emerging from trials with lecturers, and to decide design priorities to address them. Each version was released to the project team through a ‘Google group’ site for discussion. This site is where we prioritised and made suggestions for changes, and raised further design issues. The site served as a way of documenting the features for each release, the discussion of results, and the record of successive versions.
A Java prototype for module planning has been implemented at a basic level of functionality. A version of this prototype is available for the JISC R&D community to trial. We have also invited others to contribute to the development of specific functionality by making it available as open source.
The form of the tool is generated from theoretical design frameworks, such as the Conversational Framework, from interviews with lecturers from partner institutions (IOE, London Met, Royal Vet College, and LSE) about their approaches to learning design, and from observation and discussion at user workshops, at different stages of the prototype development. The evaluation was further supplemented by workshop feedback sheets, and questionnaire feedback from JISC workshops.
Throughout the second phase of the project (March 2007 to February 2008), we have been in contact with the Phoebe Planner Project, with a view to cross-linking the two tools. We are aiming towards integration of the Phoebe Planner and LPP, to build a more comprehensive online collaborative learning design system.
Dissemination of the philosophy and aims of the LPP, and the general requirement for new forms of design tools for teachers, has been carried out through presentations to conferences and seminars, in the UK and overseas (see Dissemination Activity).