Most people accept the value of group work in learning design. But team-based learning extends the learning power of group work even further.

But what is team-based learning (TBL), and how does it work?

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly TBL involves putting your learners in teams. The aim is to harness the power of accountability by using peer learning to increase and sustain engagement. This can be particularly useful in online and blended courses as teams continue to meet and discuss their tasks in between taught sessions.

You can adapt TBL according to the level and characteristics of your learners. The full methodology was developed in the 1970s in the context of medical education, and involves a structured set of pre-session work, activities and tests. However, if you’re working with adult learners you might find the full methodology too rigid. If this is the case, just adapt it to your needs.

How does team-based learning work?

Here’s an example. For several years I led an online PGCert in Creative Education which involved teaching 40-50 trainee teachers over a 9 month period. We began by putting students into 8 teams of 5-6 people, taking care to ensure a diverse mix of characteristics in each team. For the first five weeks, the teams prepared and recorded a pecha kucha presentation on learning theories. For the next five weeks, they interviewed people to find our about a range of neurodiverse characteristics and produced a podcast. We then changed the teams, and for the final five weeks of the first module the teams produced short videos about various assistive technologies.

By making learners accountable to their team mates as well as the teacher, students showed up consistently throughout the course. Why? Because they didn’t want to let their team-mates down.

The power of this dynamic should not be underestimated. Instead of me having to constantly chase each student to check up on their work and wellbeing, their team-mates automatically took on this role. The result was an engaged network of students all looking out for each other in order to complete a series of activities.

I should also mention that TBL isn’t without its challenges. As you would expect, sometimes people don’t always get on and teams don’t always gel. But this creates the opportunity to initiate discussions about respect, empathy, professional boundaries and the importance of learning how to collaborate across cultures. All of which is integral to developing the soft skills that students need to learn through a programme of higher learning.

TBL is a powerful tool that learning designers can use to increase engagement and extend learning.

P.S. And if you want some ideas about how to support teams, have a look at this thinking tool on Tuckman’s Group Development Model.

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Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash

So what is a ‘creepy treehouse’ in learning design, and how do you know if you’ve built one?

When Jeremy Hunsinger talked with Ding on our podcast, he used the phrase ‘creepy treehouse’ to describe the act of ‘building a learning experience based on what we like, now on what our students may like’. This is a common problem – it’s very easy to base learning design on our own prior experiences of teaching and learning because we’re familiar with them.

The problem is often amplified when we’re designing online and blended learning, and even when we’re just using digital tools in our teaching. We tend to use the tools we’re comfortable with.

Positives and negatives of creepy treehouses

The important thing to remember is that we should be aiming to design learning experiences that provide the most appropriate way for learners to achieve the intended outcomes. Sometimes this will involve methods, pedagogies and technologies that are very familiar to us. But often there are a range of alternatives we could use that might be more appropriate.

On the positive side, it’s important we are confident in our learning design, just as it’s important we’re confident when we’re teaching. There’s nothing worse than going into a session feeling uncertain about whether the activities or technologies will work, so having confidence is critical.

But on the negative side, there is a danger we become stuck in our ways and lose the ability to innovate in our learning designs. If we just repeat how we were taught, we risk building experiences that are outdated and out of touch with our learners.

How to avoid building creepy treehouses

Two big challenges are confidence, and time. If we lack either of these, we often default to building a creepy treehouse because it’s the easiest and quickest solution. Confidence and time are also related – developing confidence in learning design requires time to reflect, and time to experiment with new tools and pedagogies. Confidence is also greatly enhanced by discussing problems and solutions with like-minded people who are able to provide feedback and suggestions. And we need time to put our learning designs into practice so we can test and evaluate them.

So if you want to avoid building a creepy treehouse, give yourself some time to explore new ideas. Have a coffee with a colleague and talk about ideas for learning and teaching. Watch a video about a new technology and how it can be used in learning. Or give yourself permission to take a short course in learning design so you can meet and talk with other people interested in the topic.

And if you’d like to find out more, check out the episode of the Ding-O-Meter with Jeremy Hunsinger.

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• Use learners’ prior knowledge to guide learning design

Photo by KIMO on Unsplash

Everybody knows something. In fact, we all know a great deal – even by the time we’re about three years old.

Yet a common problem in learning design is assuming that learners have no ‘prior knowledge’. If we start designing learning without considering what our learners might already know, it’s highly likely we will fail to engage them effectively.

Prior knowledge of what?

For example, if we know what qualifications each learner will arrive with we should be able to anticipate their subject knowledge. If we know their age, we can make an informed judgement about their potential level of professional experience. And if we consider their potential motivation for taking the course, we can plan to include content and activities that reflect the experiences they hope to have as a result of passing the course.

By asking ourselves about the potential mix of our learners’ cultural backgrounds, we can anticipate our learners’ expectations about the course delivery. While there is always a risk of generalising, empathy can help us be more prepared for how our learners respond to specific learning activities. For example, students from Confucian Heritage cultures such as China will be accustomed to the ‘all powerful tutor’ who rarely asks questions. If our course design is highly discursive and features lots of breakout discussions, it’s possible that these students may initially struggle to engage.

Ask the right questions

So how can you find out what your learners already know? This is where empathy comes in. We can ask a series of questions to empathise with how our learners might feel as they approach the start of a course:

• how old are they likely to be?
• what is their cultural background?
• what qualifications might they have?
• what prior experience of the topic might they have?
• what prior professional experience might they have?
• what might be their reasons for taking this course?
• how might this course help them achieve their ambitions?

Each of these questions helps to clarify how best to approach the design of a course. Some questions enable us to clarify their subject knowledge, and other questions help us determine our approach to language, team work and activity design.

For those of you interested in the learning theory behind prior knowledge, it’s the theory of constructivism. This theory proposes that we ‘construct’ new knowledge on top of our existing knowledge. Think of it like LEGO – if we try and put a new LEGO brick on top of a non-LEGO brick, it won’t fit. So we need to anticipate the ‘knowledge structures’ our learners already have so they can successfully ‘construct’ new knowledge on top.

The important thing to remember about prior knowledge is this: everybody has some. If we ignore our learners’ prior knowledge, we will struggle to pitch a course at an appropriate level to engage them effectively.

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Photo by Fakurian Design™ on Unsplash

1.2 The role of empathy in learning design

Empathy often makes people roll their eyes. They think it’s all about being warm and fluffy.

Not so. In learning design, and in teaching, empathy is about strength. It’s like having the muscles of a bodybuilder. Let me explain.

The more you can empathise with someone, the more you can figure out what’s holding them back. They may lack confidence in their knowledge or skills. They could be worried about their ability to complete a task. They might be confused about their identity. In fact, they may not even know what barriers are preventing them from achieving their goals.

Empathy is a strength

This is where your ability to empathise is crucial. If you can empathise accurately and authentically with the person and the challenge they’re facing, you might just be able to change the course of their life.

It’s interesting to note that while having empathy is not always overtly promoted in teaching, asking people to teach without empathy would never be endorsed. The same argument can be said of learning design: if you design a course without empathising with the learners who you hope will take it, it’s unlikely the course will meet their needs. And yet empathy often doesn’t appear in conversations about learning design.

A little story about empathy

My colleague Phil has a helpful anecdote which really highlights why empathy is so important in learning design. Here’s Phil’s story:

The role of acceptance

The 20th century psychologist Carl Rogers argued that therapists should acknowledge what their clients say with acceptance and genuine understanding. When you’re teaching or designing learning experiences, the closer you can get to a genuine understanding of your learners’ diverse needs and backgrounds the more chance you have of designing an engaging and effective experience. By ‘accepting’ your learners as they are, you can design for the learners you have – not the learners you wish you had.

Just as importantly, genuine empathy enables you to say the thing that really needs to be said. This is entirely dependent on building trust, and on not abusing that trust. For example, if your learner has bad breath and it’s stopping them from making friends, passing their course or from getting hired, genuine empathy enables you to have that conversation in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a personal attack. This is what Rogers termed ‘unconditional positive regard’ – not simply having high expectations of your learners, but ensuring you build trust through empathy so you can have the difficult conversations that will create the conditions for transformation.

If you ask anyone to remember their best and worst teacher, they can. Teachers have awesome power, and this power can do both great and terrible things. Often, teachers don’t realise just how powerful they are. But empathy is the key to focusing and fine-tuning this power for every given situation and individual. And unconditional positive regard is the safety valve that ensures the outcome of our empathy has the learner’s best interests at heart.

Learning designers, empathy is your friend. It’s potentially the more powerful tool in your toolbox. It can unlock doors, break down walls, blow the roof off, change perspectives, engage, inspire and produce inclusive, transformational learning experiences. It’s the swiss army knife of learning design tools.

Use it well, and use it wisely.

Thank you to members of the Creative Educators community who participated and shared your views in the Soap Box discussion on this topic!

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

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 To what extent is it an educator’s responsibility to be not just technologically literate, but exceptional?

This question formed the basis of our first weekly Soap Box debate in the Creative Educators community. The debate began by examining the digital tools we currently have available to support teaching and learning. While you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that there are more than enough tools out there, a valid point was made in that many of the tools we use are not designed specifically for teaching. 

The joys of the LMS

This opened up a deep discussion on the role of the Learning Management System (LMS) in education. Despite the fact that many higher education providers will use either Blackboard, Moodle or Canvas, much has been written about why these systems are so underwhelming. You would expect that the design of these platforms would be based on extensive research into online learning, but it was pointed out that many of these systems fail to take account of the hugely diverse needs of all the people who will use it. Whereas user experience design strives to respond to factors such as the cultural backgrounds and prior knowledge of different groups of users, LMSs are often designed to be so generic that they fail to effectively meet the needs of any group.

Phil made the useful analogy that ‘nobody sets out to make a bad film’, and yet it repeatedly happens. While every decision can often be justified in isolation, the sum total of these decisions often produces a turkey. Perhaps the same is true of an LMS – the development requires such a huge amount of time, money and resource that issues become difficult to correct. And yet this same problem doesn’t seem to affect other huge tech platforms that are continuously responding to the changing needs of their users.

Another key problem lies in the capitalist obsession with innovation. The drive for technology companies to regularly provide updated products and services that they can sell to their existing customers can often work against good design principles – i.e. don’t change things that are working. Zoom is a good example of a platform that gets this very right: it’s simple to use, yet it focuses on the quality of the interaction by prioritising consistent audio and video over tons of features.

The agony of choice

Anyway, having gone down a rabbit hole with LMS, the discussion returned to the responsibility of educators to upskill themselves and the issue of choice. Given the increasing evidence that university students want a more personalised learning experience (which isn’t surprising given how much they’re paying), surely tutors should have more choice over the digital platforms they can use to support learning? This raises two problems. Firstly, universities are often paralysed by fear of GDPR with the result that educators are often prevented from using technologies that are not ‘officially’ provided by the institution. And secondly, how can educators (or anyone else, for that matter) possibly keep up with the huge range of digital platforms that could be used to support learning?

I had started off this debate holding the pragmatic position that probably ‘good enough is good enough’ – in other words, as long as educators have just enough digital literacies to support their students then this should probably be sufficient. But the final section of the debate led me to change my mind, at least if we’re serious about equipping educators with the knowledge and skills to thrive in a blended environment.

Educators need to:

1. Understand the needs of students, which requires a highly developed sense of empathy and the ability to ask effective questions;
2. Know a sufficiently large range of digital tools to enable them to make an informed decision about the most appropriate combination for a given group of students or programme of learning;
3. Have the ability and the confidence to explore, test and evaluate potential tools;
4. Appreciate how these tools can impact specific aspects of learning (e.g. collaboration, reflection, creation)
5. Be able to navigate institutional policies around GDPR, IT, intellectual property etc.

At this point I was beginning to despair, but fortunately Phil came to the rescue. He reminded me that in some of the workshops we delivered during the pandemic, the single most important factor in getting educators on board with digital technologies was enabling them to feel a sense of ownership. As soon as they realised their Zoom room, or their blog, was theirs, it transformed their approach to using it.

So to answer the original question, it would seem that educators may need to place greater emphasis on the need to develop their digital literacies. But a key aspect of the question is ‘personal responsibility’. Research over the last 12 months has shown how many educators felt unsupported by their institutions regarding digital technologies. Now, more than ever, universities need to be thinking about how they adapt policies and processes to incorporate and develop the many digital skills that educators have learned through the pandemic.

A big thank you to Rachel James for suggesting such a great question to kick off the Soap Box debates, and to Angeliki Tevekeli for generously sharing her experience in UI and UX Design.

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Why is speed networking on Zoom useful?

One of the biggest things we’ve lost through the move to online working is the ability to socialise. This is not good for two reasons:

• a great deal of learning happens socially through informal conversations
• effective team work and collaboration is built on effective social relationships

Creating opportunities for employees and /or students to get to know each other is therefore integral to developing and sustaining a productive culture of working and learning.

So how do you run a speed networking session on Zoom?

1. Prepare a short list of questions

The first thing you need to do is prepare a short list of questions that each participant has to respond to. Your questions should enable participants to reveal positive aspects of their personality and tastes. Avoid questions that may produce a negative response, as you don’t want participants to come across as negative.

Importantly, the questions should produce responses that are short – you’ll see why in a moment. These could be questions such as:

• what’s your name?
• what’s your role?
• what are you studying?
• what’s your favourite colour?
• what’s the best holiday you’ve ever had?
• who is the most inspiring person you’ve ever met and why?
• what’s your favourite piece of music?
• if you could be any animal, what would you be and why?

 Ideally, you only want four or five questions because each person will only have one minute to share their responses.

2. Start your Zoom session

Next, launch your Zoom session so participants can join. Once you’ve got as many as you think you’ll get, you can explain how the session will run.

3. Explain the rules and share your questions

It’s important that everyone understands how the session will run. Explain that you will be putting everyone into breakout groups of 4, and that each group will last 4 minutes. This gives each participant 1 minute to share their responses to your chosen questions. It’s also good remind people to try and stick to their 1 minute to allow everyone time to talk.

Once you’ve explained the rules, copy and paste your chosen questions into the chat so everyone can see them when they go into breakout groups.

4. Create your breakout groups

Click ‘Breakout Rooms’ in your Zoom toolbar to open the breakout groups panel. Choose ‘Assign automatically’, and increase the number of breakout rooms until the message on the panel indicates ‘3-4 participants per room’. Then click ‘Create’ to create the rooms, followed by ‘Open All Rooms’ to start the activity.

Your participants will now receive a message to join their breakout room. While they’re talking, it’s a good idea for you to circulate around the rooms to show that you’re engaging in the activity too.

It’s also a good idea to set a timer running on your phone so you can keep track of when 4 minutes is up.

5. Close rooms after 4 minutes

As you approach the 4 minute mark, click ‘close rooms’. By default, Zoom will tell participants they have 60 seconds before the room closes. This is good, as it means if someone hasn’t yet spoken they still have time to share their responses. You can change the duration of the countdown in your Zoom settings if you wish. 

6. Recreate breakout rooms

Once everyone returns to the main session, click ‘Breakout Rooms’ again to open your Breakout Rooms panel. Click ‘Recreate’, check your settings are still set to ‘Assign automatically’ and ensure you will still have 3-4 participants per room. This will randomise the allocation of participants to breakout rooms. Then click ‘Recreate’ again, followed by ‘Open All Rooms’.

Participants will now be invited to join their new breakout room.

7. Repeat several times

It’s up to you how many times you repeat the activity. Gradually, people will start to be in rooms with people they’ve already met, but that doesn’t matter – it means that people who might not have had a chance to speak get their chance.

Speed networking on Zoom is a great way to introduce new colleagues into a wider team, or help students on a course get to know a bit about each other.

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Why should you take the time to explain your course design? Well, helping your learners understand why they are learning in a certain way can be a powerful tool for engaging learners and overcoming resistance to learning.

You’ve almost certainly been in this position yourself. Think about the last time you bought a product that came with a poorly-designed manual, and how frustrating it is to not be able to find the information you need. On the (rare) occasions where this doesn’t happen, it’s usually because the unboxing experience explains clearly why you need to do things in a certain order.

The same dynamic occurs in learning design. If learners don’t understand why they are learning something, it can cause unnecessary frustration. And this often prevents learning from happening.

Power and resistance

Teaching and learning is about power and resistance. Typically, the teacher has most of the power and learners have very little. The teacher’s role is to use their power to help learners overcome their resistance to taking on new information.

A lot of this resistance comes from learners not understanding ‘why’ the teacher is asking them to do something. They may have signed up for a course or a training program because they are intrinsically interested in it. But equally, their interest might be more strategic – they may need to pass to apply for a job or get a promotion. Worse still, their line manager might have given them no choice but to take the course, thus creating significant resistance and resentment.

The power of why

However, explaining why a course is designed in a certain way can help reduce unnecessary resistance to learning. Taking time to go through the course design with your learners irons out much of the frustration that can arise from not knowing why they are doing a particular activity, or focusing on a certain topic.

Start by looking at the intended outcome or outcomes with your learners. Outcomes are the ultimate ‘why’, as they should influence why all the content and learning activities have been chosen. Ensuring your learners have a clear understanding of the intended outcomes enables them to construct a vision of what success looks like.

Then explain what they will need to produce to demonstrate how they have met the outcomes. This helps your learners begin to develop their understanding of the destination they are aiming for. It also enables them to get a feel for how much distance they have to travel based on their prior knowledge and experience.

Finally, talk through the sequence of steps they will need to follow to reach the destination. Doing this enables learners to visualise a path from where they are now to where they need to reach.

The journey is more important than the destination

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, it’s easy to become fixated on the content of a course. But it’s just as important to understand how this content drives the learning activities that will propel learners towards their destination.

If the journey is well-designed and clearly explained, the destination should be much easier to reach.

Photo by Tamas Tuzes-Katai on Unsplash

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