A strength in my role as a Learning Designer has been supporting teams and colleagues in the availability, adoption, evaluation and use of learning technologies to enhance their teaching content and design practice.

For each academic team I work with, I run ‘tools selection’ sessions. In most cases this begins with presenting a whistle stop tour of the various activity tools available in the OU VLE, presented from a non technical standpoint – and instead focusing on the pedagogic affordances each tool can enable or enhance from a distance learning perspective. This is aimed not to let the tools determine the teaching, but to instead help academic colleagues consider the breadth of design options available to them – and not restrict their thinking within their current understanding.

From there we’ll usually move in to the specific activities and student skills the team are looking to develop, and then matching potential tools, technologies, activities and examples to those – always considering the pros and cons.

Something I always look to stress (particularly with teams keen to play with the whizzier tools) is to make a strategic plan about which tools are being used when in the module, and considering the additional cognitive load and digital leap for students each time a new tool or interaction is introduced. My feeling (supported by evaluating tool engagement through our Analytics 4 Action work), is that the more tools and toys thrown in to the mix the more it generally dilutes student focus with the accompanying activities – and engagement with them will suffer.

For teams a little more au-fait with the technology to hand, I’ll often run a ‘what’s new and cool?’ session, updating them on the recent additions and changes to the toolset (something I keenly keep abreast of, liaising closely with our fabulous Learning Systems colleagues) to hook them in. Back in 2020, I ran a session similar to this for the school of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care – which included additional group activities inviting academics to ‘theorycraft’ hypothetical activities within their discipline areas using the design affordances of tools they had not previously encountered.

I use the the TEL In Practice (TiP) Tools resources I have developed to supplement my support for module teams in their selection of tools and technologies, as discussed in the ‘An understanding of the constraints and benefits of different technologies‘ section.

Once a module is out in the wild, with students getting stuck in to the teaching and tools, I help teams evaluate the deployment, engagement with and impact of their use of the various learning technologies. This is done within our Analytics for Action (A4A) framework, and data support meetings. 

While working as a Media Coordinator on the OpenCreate project I was responsible for helping with the deployment, testing and adoption of the OpenCreate direct authoring system. 

Regarding the deployment of bleeding edge Learning Technology, I've recently been working on testing, observing and evaluating the Digital Working Environment Exploratory Project (DWEEP), which is looking to test the viability of virtual environments for use within universities. I led on the underlying research paper, which you can check out at the Learning Innovation website.

Finally, I recently helped to prototype, and then design and write a large section of our new team VLE based induction, with my section focusing on VLE and production tools and the Learning Design practitioners toolkit.

While I think this area is one of my strengths, I do feel it is something I still have a lot of space to develop.

I came in to the role with a lot of technical knowledge and ideas around how the available tools could function, but less understanding of the importance of fore fronting the pedagogy in discussions around them with academic authors. The learning curve on this was quite steep during my first year in the Learning Design team – with my initial keenness to share my understanding of the use of the tools brushing up against the areas of responsibility for other roles, and not really pushing the ‘learning design’ side of design. Following some sharp feedback on a learning design guide to our quizzing systems I made a conscious effort to refocus more towards use in activity design.

This became much easier after starting my Pedagodzilla podcast, which boosted my confidence discussing tools in a pedagogic design context. While I think I’m much improved in this area, I think my understanding of pedagogy in practice still has a lot of space to grow – particularly at the macro (module and qualification) activity design level.

From time to time I can also let my enthusiasm for the available technology get the better of me, and have had to walk back an accidental ‘this is the best thing since sliced bread’ sales pitch on a new tool or interaction when my championing of it has resulted in a team opting to use it in a less than ideal setting. I’m particularly guilty of this with the new Audio Recording tool, which I’m conscious lines up with my own interests (podcasting!), and has some great potential for student activities around presentation and communication practice and alternative approaches to reflection. It does however introduce some tricky accessibility considerations, particularly in an assessment setting.

I’m now making a conscious effort to be a bit more balanced in how I present learning technology, without losing the underlying energy and enthusiasm that I feel can be necessary to getting teams to consider exploring different technologies in their module designs. I’ve still got a way to go with this, but I think I’m gradually getting better – and the teams I work with taking a more strategic approach to tool use would seem to indicate that it’s gradually percolating through. I feel my efforts to bring data I've gathered through my data support meetings in to those discussions has really helped.