Could pedagogical planners be a useful learning design tool for university lecturers?

Designing learning for the higher education environment is a complex task: learning materials need to take into account different student ability levels, learning approaches, media and curriculum. Learning Design is a professional discipline in which many of our lecturers have no qualifications. However, this situation might be improved with good guidance, inspiring examples, and supportive tools. It is suggested that pedagogical planners may provide lecturers with a learning design scaffold that guides them through the learning design process so that they might develop effective and pedagogically sound learning designs. This paper reports on the case for pedagogical planners and is the first stage in a major project that will be further developed throughout 2008–2009.