Designing for blended learning, sharing and reuse

The concept of design for learning has arisen as education faces up to the implications of modern pedagogy, student diversity, and the affordances of information and communication technologies. This paper examines some of the benefits and issues for teachers in further and higher education surrounding the idea of learning design and its practical implementation in blended learning. It looks particularly at questions of documenting and representing learning designs so that they can be communicated to others. It explores the differing requirements of representations at various stages in the planning and sharing process, and for different communities of users, finding that multiple perspectives on a learning design are usually necessary. However, few representations to date have succeeded in capturing the essence of a good piece of teaching. Ways of representing designs as dynamic processes, rather than static products, may need to be developed. The paper is based on the outcomes of work with practising teachers during the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded Models of Practice Project, part of JISC's Design for Learning Programme, which runs from 2006 to 2007.