Recurring motifs : designing for higher education learning

Learning design has received growing attention as Universities have grappled with shifts to blended learning, incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies in course offerings, and conduct of fully online program suites. MOOCs, certification and badging have swept us off our feet at the same time as increasing scrutiny for program accreditation, quality assurance, and effective student learning experience. The Journal of Learning Design [http://www.jld.edu.au] is an open-source peer-reviewed online journal which, through a decade of publication from 2005, has tracked a representative sample of the problems and tentative solutions in learning design across the Higher Education sector both in Australia and internationally. This paper will present an overview of the recurring motifs, and will provide a consolidated view of the state of the art for learning design research and development based on an extensive audit of the accepted submissions, including the editorials, for the Journal of Learning Design. The method adopted is similar to that of other researchers who have used a bibliographic data set to identify what is of importance or is problematic in the field (see, for example, Fox & Diezmann, 2007; Lubienski & Bowen, 2000). The authors will profile the themes using impact measures such as downloads, citations, and index data, and from this and an environmental scan will propose the next directions for contemporary learning design. The value of such an approach lies in its enforcing of a broader perspective than might be drawn from one’s own experience and a narrow discipline or location bias. Lubienski and Bowen (2000) explained that claims in the field might “seem consistent with one’s own impressions of the literature, one might still wonder if these impressions are accurate” (p. 626). This paper has challenged the impressions of the authors and is similarly bound to challenge the impressions of those who engage with its findings. References Fox, J., & Diezmann, C. (2007). What Counts in Research?A Survey of Early Years’ Mathematical Research, 2000-2005, Contemporary Issues in Early ChildhoodVolume 8, Number 4, 2007. 301- 312. www.wwwords.co.uk/CIEC Lubienski, S.T. & Bowen, A. (2000) Who’s Counting? A survey of mathematics education research 1982-1998, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 31(5), 626-633. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/749890