 Hello everyone and welcome back to our YouTube channel. I'm Sonia Trivedi, communications manager here at Moodle and I have with me Sun Taylor, a senior e-learning consultant at Catalyst IT Europe, a premium Moodle partner. Sun is a practice lead of pedagogy and community and she's here to share her knowledge and expertise on the importance of learning design in e-learning solutions. Sun, welcome. Hi, very nice to have you here. Firstly, you have an impressive title. If you had to explain that to someone who doesn't know what pedagogy is, can you please tell me more about it? What does it mean? So pedagogy in a nutshell is all about the science of teaching and learning. So the word pedagogy actually comes from the teaching of children, but in my world we don't obviously just teach children, we teach adults and that's a different science, so that's called androgogy and then you've got the self-learning, the hoitagogy, but it basically means that I support our clients, I support our hosted clients, I support the community, I support ourselves internally on any projects or work that involves supporting creation of content, creation of programs, looking at feedback from past runs of courses and making improvements to make sure that the learning is actually happening. Great, great. And do you have a team? I suppose you do. I work as part of a team of consultants, so at Catalyst my job is not part of the technical team, so at Catalyst we do hosting for universities and NGOs, but in our team it's more the business development side supporting our clients and customers who have questions and it could also involve working with people who we don't host so people can come to us on the back of a conference or they've seen us online or they've heard about us through word of mouth and they come to us and ask for help. So I work in a team with business development officers, I work with the sales team, we have a great digital marketing lead and I help write content for her and I also work with the product specialists to help solve complex queries that come through our ticketing system, so why are the courses not completing, why can't my students see this module, why has the certificate not released, so it's quite a broad range and our team deal with all of that. Yes, I can imagine, sounds like you guys are doing a great job but I'm curious to know a little bit more about your customers, what kind of customers do you usually work with? So in the European office, so we are actually a global organisation, we have offices in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, but in the UK office and Europe we deal with a lot of universities, so we host quite large universities like UCL, we host Birkbeck, we host Bath University, all these big universities are very big Moodle users over in Ireland as well, we look after Dublin City University, Maynooth and a couple of others and we do the hosting for them, we support them with their upgrades and security but also we do monthly meetings with our clients as well, so we look after those and make sure that their platforms are always standing up, especially during exam periods or during the rush in September and all the students log in and you know as well as then we also look after NGOs, we have some quite big charities but also training organisations, people that deliver apprenticeships or CPD training to teachers. Right, okay and now talking about your customers, I am curious to ask you more about your own work and let's explore it in a bit more details, what have you been working on lately, can you tell us more? Yeah so obviously you said my job title at the start was pedagogy and community and I have to stress you know how much the Moodle community is part of my role as well, so a lot of the stuff I've been doing with regards to pedagogy and learning design so that would be working with clients to look at what they currently have and make improvements for the next year, so this could be from having a very customised, heavily developed customised platform which is obviously the beauty of open source, you can build all these custom things but actually say well you know the technology has moved on a lot now, there's a lot of core features that you could use instead so it's looking at the whole platform and identifying new features and work arounds that doesn't involve development which makes upgrades a lot quicker and this is all the scaled down to maybe some courses that a university has ran, they've gathered student feedback and they want to put the feedback into action but they don't know how or they don't have the time or they want to know what other universities are doing so I've been doing a lot of work with creating content based on the back of feedback from students. Other things I've been doing internally at Catalyst talk about the community, I put on special show and tell talks between the teams so I get the developers sharing some of the stuff that they've been doing with each other so we call them our tech talks, we have them on a Wednesday and a dev will say well I've been working on SAML2 integration, I say right do a 15-minute show and tell and I'll record it and share it but also I've been getting involved in the community joining webinars and things like that so it's quite a broad range of stuff and I've been helping our business development teams write and create content for sales pictures and stuff so lots and lots of stuff. Must be very exciting. I love my job so much. Amazing, amazing but now I would like to request you to explain a little bit more to our viewers the role of learning designers. Okay so what is the role of learning designers in creating courses? What do they actually do? So with my learning designer hat on so I designed the training materials for my colleagues here at Catalyst so what I do is I work with the actual subject matter experts because it's very rare that a learning designer would be the subject matter experts they're just responsible for getting the information out of the people that have all the knowledge so what I would do is I would speak with them I get all the key concepts that I want out of them and then I start talking to them about okay so how like for example with a developer you know how would you want them to demonstrate that they have these PHP skills that we want them to have how could they what sort of outputs do they do and then you design the learning activities around that because at the end of the day the learning design you have to be able to measure a person's ability and skills against the job that they do so there's no point just giving them lots of information and then asking them to sit and exam at the end of the day because they don't do exams they demonstrate and this is where you can design the actual assessment to be maybe right here is a a brief go away come up with some responses to the questions how you would do this in your situation and then maybe present it back in a video or a working example so the learning design it's not just here's the content sit and exam it's like no okay so what is the context and you build in throughout your design small little assessment steps just to make sure that they've understand the key concepts so that when it actually comes to the end and you're having to prove that you have finished the learning that the skills that you've gathered can be demonstrated and Moodle provides all the tools to be able to do that okay okay and going a little bit deeper into the topic does it matter if you design for face-to-face instruction and learning environments what are the difference do they have anything in common can you elaborate yeah I mean so they have a lot in common and you know I have to stress that designing for online is very very different to designing in for the classroom a lot of this was made apparent during the pandemic where the lockdown happened and everybody flipped to online delivery and this is where tools like Moodle really came into their own because teachers and lecturers were getting very very stressed you know you hear of this zoom fatigue and the fact that you know they were trying to deliver live content online and they were getting tired because they were just constantly broadcasting broadcasting broadcasting what the online environment can facilitate is asynchronous learning offline learning so students can go through the content they can answer questions they can gather their thoughts they can curate all their content and then when it comes to the live session that's when they can ask the questions of the experts that's when they can do more workshopping and in-depth thinking because they've got all the knowledge up front it's like they try there's this model called the flip classroom model for face-to-face teaching and that's where you ask your learners to go away read up gather information gather questions put together notes of stuff that they didn't quite understand and that's what gets addressed in the face-to-face sessions and that's kind of like how the online learning environment can work and come really comes into its own but if you're designing purely for the classroom you know you can design these hybrid models of teaching but in my experience when you're delivering hybrid sessions designed for online first because it still works in a face-to-face situation but if you're designing for face-to-face it can be difficult to then try and deliver it online at the same time so you do have to have a different approach for each one right okay that's really interesting and if you take as a case study the digital learning content digital educational content can you please elaborate a bit more why is learning design important especially for digital learning environments so it is important because a lot of people are really familiar with how to learn in a classroom when you go online it can be very you have very different experiences and so it's really important in your learning design that you have your signpost you have your assessment points because you don't always have the instant feedback like you would do in a classroom so for example you know your teacher is talking to you or your lecturer is designed like a desk a table-based activity group work you are constantly getting feedback from your peers you're constantly getting feedback from your teacher but online sometimes it can be quite lonely so you have to structure these assessment points in you have to structure these three point points in and it's also a really good learning design it's about putting you the human into your content as well so it doesn't feel like a robot you're working with a robot but you're actually working with a real person so good learning design has you know the feedback opportunities the assessment opportunities and it's also you've got to make sure that it's all accessible as well and you know it's not just you know whether they need tools to help them learn like screen readers or text-to-speech but it's also accessible like through different devices as well so they're very very different things but just making sure that the content is you know able to be got out from multiple devices so when it comes to learning design you have to really structure you can't just upload a load of power coins and just say have at it kids it's the case of okay if I was a learner would I understand this how would I know I got it if I haven't got it who do I ask for help or how do I know that I'm progressing the same as my peers or how do I know that I am progressing where's the end what do I have to do to finish so these are all things that good learning design in the online space can really really really help people especially if you especially well definitely if you've been out of learning for a long time yeah okay it seems like you need to have really a structured process to create good learning design right yes and talking a little bit more about that if you can tell us about the tools and techniques that learning designers use to achieve their objectives I know we can talk probably another hour absolutely but still it would be interesting to know are there any new trends just a little bit more about that yeah so I mean you really could have an interview on its own like a series of interviews about learning design and especially when you think about when you're designing learning there's a very big difference between education and training so designing content or designing learning and courses and programs for a university is very very different to designing a say like a like a health and safety course done online you know we've all done them where we sit and we have to do our you know e-learning when we first join a company there's a very very big difference and that there's lots of models out there so for example some of the universities that I work with they use the abc model learning design model and it's absolutely fabulous because it looks at all the different ranges of processes that a learner has to go through and and the different tools and techniques to get that to happen and it looks across like the whole entire program of learnings not just one course but you know all the modules together so is there enough opportunities for collaboration is there enough opportunities for communication feedback reflection evaluation and it helps map that out and a lecture and in their teams to identify actually we don't do a lot of group work where what can we do to fill that hole and you know to make sure that our learners have those skills and then looking at the as I was saying these or like training type of content you know there's all sorts of models like the adi model you know ways of making sure that when you design that every time you go to review your content is it doing what you set out to do are your learners achieving first time if not do you need to change your content and all these different models that the things that straddle the both the both both of them so things like universal design for learnings this is looking at you know your learners and making sure that they are having the information presented to them in a way that they can readily you know consume absorb understand but also giving them the opportunities to give back so for example this video interview for me is like you know really really nerve wracking for me but if this was just an audio or a live broadcast i'd be absolutely fine and if you gave me the choice i'd say let's do a live webinar i'd be happy to talk you know so it's just giving people the choice to express their learning back to you in a way that suits them but also it could challenge them as well in a good way so lots of different things and you know they're moodle moodle academy have run a really really good series of webinars on learning design so you know there's lots of stuff out there if people are interested nice amazing actually you mentioned a couple of times about moodle so i can't help asking you a little bit more about that so how does moodle allow you to support good pedagogy can you share from your experience yeah so i have been using moodle since 2007 so it's been a long long time and i have worn very hats very you know very different hats with moodle so i've used moodle as a student i've used it as a decided administrator as a teacher i use moodle teaching adult education and b-tech diplomas i also use moodle as a learning technologist so this is working in universities and supporting academics using it and the tools in moodle have always supported good pedagogy they've always when martin you know created moodle it was very clear that he wanted something that teachers could use it was more than just a virtual notice board for them to chuck up slides you know there's forums in there to support conversation and the beauty of moodle with their forums is you can use those forums for different things forum could just be a general discussion forum or you could have a focused forum which is designed and built and scaffolded to support a particular learning activity so when i was working at crownfield university basic defense academy we had a lecturer there who used forums for scholarly discussions so she assigned them a couple of articles to read and they would have to summarize the article in a forum post and then they had to then respond to each other's forum posts asking critical questions you know to try and get their sort of skills of you know written communication up to scratch but also be able to ask the right questions and moodle supports just i'm just using forums an example moodle has evolved so much that you can do things like i don't want to say force users to interact so you can say this activity is not complete unless you've posted once and responded three times but you they also have now and grading built into moodle as well so you can actually grade the forums so it's at the moodle has really come a long way in supporting the learning process so whether it would be um like i say conversations so the communication side the collaboration side like the wikis and other tools like the database tool um you can use these tools to combine learning combine knowledge the assessment tools are incredible but the biggest thing that supports like really good learning design is the ability to track progress so me as a learner i can see where i am i have due dates i have content that appears as in when i finished the previous one but also as a teacher i can go in and see okay my students or my learners are all following the right path of this person's a little bit behind i can intervene and i can support so lots of tools there in moodle to make sure that learners know where they're going they know how to get there and they know what happens when they get there and what happens afterwards and that's you know the beauty of moodle for me great thank you very much Sam and before we end i have one more question actually you mentioned a couple of times learners so i wanted to know how things look like from the learner's perspective it seems like learning design concepts are more about learner's center design am i correct so how do we involve learners in the design process can you share a little bit more about that the student feedback some examples yeah yeah so it it depends on the situation so for example internally at catalyst we um like i said i i work with our subject matter experts to create content and we use pure moodle native tools so we use h5p we use feedback tool not just to give us feedback but for reflection as well because you know you can use all these tools in lots of different ways it's amazing um like quizzes assessments stuff like that and using those tools internally we can see what um you know con what what items people regularly get wrong and we can intervene but also the feedback is important so we um as a team um who look after all the learning we review the feedback every year we see what they have to say they'll say i really did not like that activity it did not make sense and then we can actually look at it and say actually maybe it doesn't make sense um you know it's part of our internal review process so i build the course based on the subject matter it gets reviewed by lots of different stakeholders before we actually release it to the whole company it's very very similar when i work with my um HE partners so it will be either we've had feedback this is what they want we've had the student union have a look at it as well this is their feedback and they'd like to see more um for example there was a lot of we need to sit down and read this and sit down and do this can it be a bit more active how do we get the feedback is we'd like to be a bit more active how can we be a bit more active and then you say well okay well this is where universal design for learning comes in because those that only have 10 minutes to sit a computer and do it can do this activity or they can actually just listen to it so you can record a podcast version of the content they can walk and they have a different activity to do to follow up to make sure that they've understood it so this is where the student voice and learner voices really do come in because at the end of the day as a learning designer we don't know everything we are constantly learning and evolving we learn through experience and these are the skills that we're trying to get our learners and our students to understand as well that they learn through experience so you have to go through something before you can improve so the learner and student voice is really really important and it also makes sure that you know if you're a good learner if you're a good organization that really cares about your people you are going to keep you know wanting to keep hold of them you want to keep inspiring them don't just keep giving them the same old stale stuff refresh it give new ideas try stuff be a bit brave and if it doesn't work fine it doesn't work at least you know not to do it again and just try a different way or revert back to the archway there's lots of things that you can do to bring the learner's voice into the content thank you very much Sam it was wonderful talking to you and getting your insights on learning design we learned a lot today and thanks to our audience for joining us we will be back for another video episode soon in the meantime you can reach out to catalyst it europe and learn more about their services at catalyst slash eu.net if you would like to learn more about our partner network visit us at Moodle.com and of course don't forget to subscribe here to our youtube channel to catch future episodes thank you and see you soon