 Fantastic, great to be here in this wonderful hall standing below a pipe organ. I used to play these things, so that's why I'm doubly excited. Anyway, I am talking about this topic, which is quite a mouthful, so let me shorten this. This is a presentation about the learning designer and online tool that we've developed, and that is supposed to do exactly that. Yeah, be an online platform to help teachers design their courses. So this is just a bit of background about me. I'm working at the UCL Knowledge Lab. It's an interdisciplinary research lab in the middle of London, part of UCL and the Institute of Education. But what I'm presenting here, actually, I only play a really tiny role because to get the learning designer to where it is today, all of these people were involved, probably more, who I forgot to mention. Sorry if you should be on there and aren't. But you can also see on the right-hand side that there were a number of institutions involved. So it's not just a small cotton industry or a small pet project, but quite some significant thing. And this thing started back in 2006. It's quite a while ago. But let's look into the purpose of the learning designer. Or can I have a quick show of hands who of you have actually gone to the website of the learning designer? Oh, well, yeah, a few, not quite half, thank you. So, yeah, let me talk you through the purpose. One purpose is to help people, teachers in particular, because teachers can juggle multiple things when they need to design a course. And that is actually quite a lot of stuff that they have to think of. So we want to provide a platform that provides some support. So that also brings people together to help out each other so that people can learn from other people's designs. But also we want to provide the ready-made molds where the pieces of a puzzle fit in in order to make the design easier. Now, when we talk about learning design, I am using the definition brought forward by the La Nacca Declaration, that was 2008 or so? Well, quite a while ago. And since then we've seen a few learning design frameworks emerge. I've mentioned a few of them in my slides that are on the old session page. These are all clickable so you can find your way through there. And alternative frameworks are available. This is not an exhaustive list. But what these frameworks have in common is they work on the assumption of a process with the steps that I've listed there to the left. They are not the exact steps that are replicated everywhere but broadly, these are the steps that you follow when you're designing a course, more or less. Now, the learning designer does not want to respond to all of these steps. The learning designer focuses on activity development, first and foremost. And then I've mentioned another thing, the ABCLD, ABC workshops. Hands up if you have heard of the ABC learning design workshop. Oh, many more hands. Right, brilliant. So I don't need to say too much about this but you will know that the ABC workshops address more the first stages when you start learning designs and so on. You already get a little bit into sequencing but it stops there. When you want to develop the activities in detail and insert proper pedagogy and think about what students actually do down to the little details, that's what the learning designer is for. And in theory, the learning designer could also effectively does already address all of these other aspects but they are not featuring very highly. Maybe in the future, it did in the past. Speaking of the past, let me run you through the history of the learning designer. As I mentioned, starting in 2006, we started with the London Pedagogy Planner at the then the London Knowledge Lab, now the UCL Knowledge Lab. And at the same time, Phoebe, the Phoebe Pedagogy Planner from the University of Oxford was developed both just funded projects. And when they ended, we joined forces and found significant funding from ESRC and the TLRPTEL program in 2008 or 2009 or so. So still 10 years ago. And we built a really big team to develop the learning design support environment. Out of that resulted a number of resources like the CRAM tool, cause resources allocation modeler. I won't ask for any hands up if you've heard of that. Probably not, but it still exists more on that later. The learning designer arise from the Pedagogical Pattern Collector which was part of the LDSE. And from the learning designer, that was actually the origin of the ABC workshops. So the learning designer was there first. Just mentioning it. Here's a screenshot of the early version of the London Pedagogy Planner. And if you look closely, I'm not sure if you can read the top tabs, but it says module outline, module resources, then calendar and session planner. So back in that time, we actually thought about the larger things, not just activities, but how to combine these activities to a proper module and how to link learning outcomes with topics, how to link that all with assessment types. Now we've taken all that out for the moment because these things are properly complex and putting them into a tool is a challenge. It's not easy and it's not a challenge that we have cracked yet. So what we've also developed is this economic modeling of a course and that's the course resource allocation modeler. It still exists. There's a link in the presentation where you can download a Java version of it. We have developed it already as a web service to be used for the UCL life learning, non-accredited courses, design and so on. I'm not sure if they are using it at the moment. So we have the web service ready, but we have not yet released it because it is really rough around the edges. It's very specific to UCL at the moment. So, but you can still go and download the Java tool if you want to the economic modeling. The benefit is you can then see how expensive your pedagogy actually is and you can compare how much you're saving or not when you move a course from face to face to online or when you try to capture economies of scale. Now, yeah, and then we also experimented with timelines in the LDSE, all of which we've taken out. Why? Because we wanted to develop a tool that is usable for normal people. If you have all these tools that I've just shown you with all their complexities, they are complex. Use them, you have to put so much data into it that you lose the will to live. So your course design would never be ready. So what we've tried over the years is to simplify the process. We have thought everything through in pretty much great detail, but it was unmanageable. So we reduced the complexity and what we've ended up with is the current version of the learning designer which makes a number of pedagogic assumptions, theoretical assumptions, also pragmatic assumptions, but these assumptions have been researched over the past few years over these previous activities. Therefore, we can be reasonably sure that these assumptions are reasonable to make and are representing reality. And that makes it effectively easier for the person who now uses the learning designer because it's a manageable process. So this is what we have at the moment. We have the activity designer as the learning designer. We have the ABC workshops as quick fire team-based workshops when you want to start your module designs. And we have the CRAM tool to model the economics. And modeling economics is quite interesting when you consider the stakeholders of learning designs. You know, most tools, most frameworks even concentrate on students and teachers. Maybe QA gets involved somewhere and maybe there is some strategic involvement because when you're designing more than the module, the whole program that always has strategic components in it. But financial planners and support services, they are probably an afterthought or do not get involved at all in the learning design. And that's what we want to tackle in the long term. We have the basics in place with the CRAM tool and so on but we still need to find a way to make this manageable in order to get an environment where we can properly involve all the learning science stakeholders that I've listed here. Just a word on the QA people. Our learning designer produces outputs you can export, for example, a word document and the idea is actually that you can then use these documents to pass it into the QA process when your module is validated or so. So yeah, I think it's important to consider all these non-obvious stakeholders and not just focus on teachers and learners. But that's our main focus, good pedagogy. So this is how the learning designer looks and it's free to use. It will always be free. There might be some paid components later on but that's a long way away. The core and substantial component will remain free. The learning designer theoretically is based on Dyna-Laurelard's conversational framework going all the way back to Gordon-Pasch conversation theory and so on. So there's a really good body of theory behind it that's well thought through. And more recently, I mean, yeah, Dyna-Laurelard has distilled these learning types, these six colored things here, acquisition, collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice and production. And these learning types, I've seen them, well, you've seen them in the ABC workshops but I've seen them elsewhere as well. They seem to strike a chord and they actually can represent any activity under the sum that you can imagine. You can represent this as a combination of these learning types. So whether you do resource-based learning, collaborative exercises, some, I don't know, debates and so on, you can represent this as a combination of these learning types and that works quite well. It's just six types, easy to grasp, easy to get into and when you stick to these types then you can quite easily, well, design things. And when you understand these types that's effectively the framework that we can use to have a common language. And when we have a common language then we can communicate our designs much easier. And that's the second purpose of the learning designer. I should say you do need to know what these learning types are about. They are more or less almost self-explanatory but you still need to internalize them. So you do need a bit of expertise when you are designing. Even though we are making the process easier with these tools it is not as simple as we see in other industry where you suddenly can create a full movie on your telephone. Well, you can now create learning designs on the telephone which I'll demonstrate in a second but you do need some background knowledge, some really serious background knowledge. So I'm actually very happy to say that at least in our little bubble of academia for the education schools we, it is still not time to get rid of experts. So this is where we are with cram to a learning designer module and the ABC workshops. And we are going to rebrand the learning designer so you see a potential new logo there. What we're currently working on is an API in order to allow other tools to connect with it. We want to develop sharing learning designs and that's what we need the common language for that I've just mentioned. So these learning types have propagated quite nicely so well let's use them. We have the platform where we can upload from ABC straight into the learning designer, learning designs and then we can share them and people kind of understand what they are because they have worked with these learning types before. And then we also want to export straight into the VLE so that when you create a learning design in the learning designer you can export it not just to Moodle later on also other VLEs they are also available and it automatically populates a structure in your VLE. So in terms of integrations there's this yeah the API we already have a working example for our API so it works in practice which is the rapid input tool which we are developing in conjunction with the further developments of the ABC workshops. And yeah I'm not mentioning my program but Simon Walker who has developed this is now also at UCL so there's an option to link it with assessment as well but this is a video demonstration of the mobile friendly learning designer tool so this is how you would design, oops this should be a video this is how you can design this lecture here how you can represent this lecture based on a mobile device now where's the button here? So we choose the read watch list yeah I have done this in the background and in the learning designer this is the live view of the learning designer I can then enter all the details like the instructions for students what they have to do and then I get all the additional analytics experience so I can see what your learning experience of this lecture is very acquisition driven and then I can export it straight into the VLE if I want to and I even have entered some outcomes based on Bloom's taxonomy and so on so it's pretty heavy theory driven but it's actually pretty straightforward to do learning science even on your mobile device yeah so this is, let me just finish off this is the learning designer roadmap version one zero already exists and the next step is we want to develop blocks so that we can bundle activities into a module the public API is already working but it's undocumented yet so not available to you, wait a little bit we want to develop a new support site in April I'm starting a new MA module fully online which is about this topic here and we also want to offer some workshops without any accreditation in order to do better learning designs then we want to develop the community we want to enhance peer review functionality in the learning designer so that people can collaborate on the learning designs and then in the long term we also want to monetize this with a paid plan for institutions so that institutions can have a walled garden and their own review processes and so on so currently we have 150 daily users more than 3000 a month and we do have evidence there's a paper linked that tells you quite a bit quite a lot of detail about what the responses to the learning designers were in the past few years and I will stop here and not talk about shareability that's not really necessary only so far if you're interested in an institutional deployment then absolutely do get in touch we'd like to explore this in more detail thanks for your attention thank you Tim let's start with some questions in the audience here anyone raise your hand to get a roving mic no there's some questions online though someone says where's the learning designer available at this address you need the UCL logon is it open source? you do need a log in but it's not the UCL log in so you need to create an account so if you go to the ucl.ac.uk slash learning-designer website you need to register an account first before you can access okay that answers that question you answered the second one also can be edited by an institution to make it specific they need to come to you and talk to you yes we are not there yet with creating walled gardens but that's our plan and we need to engage with the community in order to see how best to take that forward and there was another question with our RSE is the LD open source now the code of the application is not open source but it's open access really so it's a free tool it's open to use and the learning science that you create there's no license or ownership attached to that but the code we are not making available so you cannot install it on your own system okay it's software as a service yeah you also asked you answered this one about running a workshop more than just the ABC is the learning designer run as a workshop or something that an academic would use after attending an ABC yeah the idea is users would use it on their own at the moment but as I've just mentioned at the end we want to create or offer workshops to help you get to grips with the learning designer and how to make best use of it but also we want to enhance the tools within the learning designer to allow a collaborative design building because at the moment well you can assemble around one screen or so but a student of mine has just written her dissertation and put forward a few ideas of building an integrating online community where you have multiple people working on on the same design at the same time okay okay thank you any more final questions from the audience Idina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple or Jupyter Notebook servers our DigiMap services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology