Grand Challenge: Data-empowered Societies
Learning technologies have huge promise but pose real challenges for teachers who want to embed them creatively into their practice. UCL’s Learning Designer platform has been designed to enable teachers to take control of the design of technology-enhanced learning and has been taken up globally at all levels: from individual classrooms to the design of large institutional learning platforms like MOOCs. The work supports UCL’s Grand Challenges’ aspirations to build Data Empowered Societies.
The platform is based on decades of interdisciplinary research led by UCL Institute of Education Emeritus Professor Diana Laurillard (Department of Culture, Communication and Media) into the complex dynamics of integrating new technologies into the design of student learning, drawing on the expertise of designers, educationalists and computer scientists.
Founded on the Conversational Framework, Professor Laurillard’s model of teaching and learning with technology (see Teaching as a Design Science), the platform is designed for teachers in all sectors of education, subjects and countries, as well as learning designers in the educational technology industry. As such, it supports collaborative knowledge building across the education community.
Underpinning research
The research began with funding from the ESRC/EPSRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme, resulting in the first iteration of the platform, a visual planning tool that enables teachers to structure their students’ learning. Users can specify activity types, their duration, group sizes and modalities (online/offline, synchronous/ asynchronous), facilitating a comprehensive approach to lesson planning. It also provides visual analytics, such as pie and bar charts, to represent the distribution of learning activities.
This feedback enables educators to assess and balance their educational designs, promoting diverse and engaging learning experiences. The saved dashboard means the pedagogic design can be peer reviewed, enabling the teaching community to build on and test each other’s ideas and innovations.
The tool is free to ensure access is inclusive, and designs can be written in other languages. A translation of the interface is enabled through a protocol guide and online video guidance on using it is available free on YouTube.
Supporting a global community of teachers
The Learning Designer has been embedded in UCL courses, FutureLearn courses, commissioned workshops and international presentations. In a typical year, the platform analytics show that over 40,000 users access the Learning Designer, achieving global impact in more than 180 countries, nearly two-thirds from low- and middle-income countries. Since 2020, the platform has achieved over 3.5 million page views, 1 million unique visits, and 350,000 return visits. Since its launch in 2014, more than 300,000 learning designs have been created and shared on the platform, impacting teaching practices that make effective use of digital methods to promote active and social learning for students.
The UCL MOOC, Blended and Online Learning Design, provides a comprehensive introduction to the platform and is targeted at school, college and university teachers and attracts participants from other sectors. One participant summed up the impact on their practice:
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