Learning Designer

The Learning Designer is a tool to help teachers and lecturers design teaching and learning activities and share their learning designs with each other. It was developed by a team led by Diana Laurillard at the UCL Knowledge Lab and is free for anyone to use.

The tool is based on the six learning types from Diana Laurillard’s Conversational Framework – a model of the conditions necessary for learning to take place. The six learning types are: Read/Write/Listen (or Acquisition), Inquiry, Practice, Production, Discussion and Collaboration. In principle, a good learning design will contain a mix of all of these types of learning.

There are two screens in the Learning Designer: the Browser screen and the Designer screen. You can search for and adapt other people’s learning designs in the Browser screen or design your own from scratch in the Designer screen.

The tool provides feedback on your design by showing you the proportion of each of the six learning types in your eventual design in the form of a pie chart, so you can see where you might need to make adjustments.

The learning designs you have created or adapted will appear under “My Designs” in your personal space, where you can also save other designs you find useful.

This is an early version of the tool and further functionality is being developed.