What's on this site?
Everything you'll find on this site is about design thinking and creativity, applied to the practice of learning design.
This site was originally designed to provide resources for anyone interested in designing more creative e-learning. And it's constantly growing as more resources are added. All the resources are based on research into a wide range of design disciplines including architecture, product design, interior design, graphics and web design. Our premise is that the relatively immature discipline of learning design - previously called "instructional design" - may have something to learn from these more mature design disciplines.
Learning design?
The focus of this site is the design of learning experiences for adults, mainly in large, non-educational organisations. There is a strong emphasis on learning with technology, but this is not primarily an "e-learning site", as the relationship between the many forms of learning is becoming increasingly complex. The site tries to avoid the the term "instructional design" because of the implications that this carries with it: that instructional designers are predominantly writers of text; that instructional design is about instructing people, not helping them learn; that Instructional Systems Design is the default methodology...
There are plenty of online places to go if you want to find out about, or talk about:
- Learning design theory
- Learning theory
- Learning technology
- Future trends in learning and technology
- Industry gossip
But there is a lack of information aimed at helping real-world learning designers - practitioners - design better, and be more creative. That's what this site aims to do.
Patterns?
This site aims to take a pragmatic approach. Most of the site is made up of short essays called "patterns", that are intended to be read quickly in a few minutes. They provide tasters for specific topics. Each pattern takes as its starting point a common problem faced by learning designers. It provides a short discussion of the issue, then offers recommendations as to how the problem might be addressed. This approach is based loosely on the work of architectural theorist, Christopher Alexander. The patterns are arranged in a hierarchy, as in Alexander's approach. Many of the patterns have supporting tools and checklists.
