What is ‘learning design’?

‘Learning design’ is a term used right now for what I do for a living.

Fifteen years ago, it was generally called ‘instructional design’ if you were fancy, and ‘training design’ if you were old-school. There was a patch about ten years ago when all the cool people were calling themselves ‘learning experience designers’, and saying that this was fundamentally cooler than instructional design, in exactly the same way I’d previously heard the difference between instructional design and training design spoken of (often by exactly the same people).

Apparently, if one is using the most recent wording, then what one is doing supports organisational goals, respects learners as three-dimensional human beings, and results in real improvements in how work is done. If one uses the wrong (old) term, it means one is just packaging up information into some sort of format, or failing to respect learners. (Apparently training implies a lack of respect, because one trains animals?)

You can probably tell I don’t think the actual word is the issue here. (I kind of love that Cathy Moore, with her hugely successful Action Mapping technique, calls the job ’training design,’ Moore, 2017.)

I’m pretty sure the problem is just that if a job title is seen as being cool, everyone uses that title, and then the people who want to be seen as extra-cool need to find a new title so they stand out again. If I was French, apparently I’d be calling myself an ingénieur pédagogique (pedagogical engineer), with all the implications of expertise that ‘engineer’ carries, despite the fact that an engineer requires a three-year degree full of maths and physics papers, and an adult learning certificate is generally less than one year.

But what is it?

Learning design, or workplace learning design, is designing educational activities and resources that teach people how to do their jobs.

This can be anything from an induction programme, to a workshop, to an e-learning module, to a board game. One project I worked on involved making a competition based around a 1:38 scale model of a farm, to teach farmers about risk management. Another was a series of coaching guides.

I also occasionally veer off into making things that aren’t about work or jobs — educational videos around civil rights or Māori language, or that aren’t about learning — UX design for webapps or website information architecture. It’s all pretty much pulling on the same skillset.

Research-based practice

Twenty years ago, entering workplace education from the educational publishing sector, I was pretty disturbed to find that using ADDIE, the Kirkpatrick model, and Bloom’s taxonomy was referred to as ‘research-based practice’.

ADDIE is an acronym for a learning resource development process: Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate. Kirkpatrick has done plenty of research to support his evaluation model, but fundamentally, it is a theoretical model, not research on what works. And Bloom’s taxonomy, as I mostly saw it used, is a handy list of words that resulted from a brainstorming session by a group of mid-century educators.

All three do actually have solid bodies of research around them, but that’s not what I was seeing being used. It was just the high-level models or vocabulary.

The idea that learning objectives needed to be testable was standard. The idea that they need to be testable within the medium of instruction (as I believe) still seems to be non-standard today.

But what did I think ‘research-based practice’ meant?

I’d just come from working at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) as copy-editor of the journal set: Research Information for Teachers. So I thought research-based practice in education was where an educator ran a research project looking at their own practice to analyse what was working, what wasn’t and why. Or when another educator read a peer-reviewed journal article explaining that person’s results and used that to improve their own work. It is possible I had quite high standards.

But also, I thought, if teachers can evaluate their work to see what works, why can’t we? It took a while before I found ways to get this firmly embedded in my work.

The modern toolkit

Times have changed, or more likely, I’ve learned more about the field.

These days I see learning design as sitting in the midst of a range of allied skillsets and jobs: learning science, cognitive science, neuropsychology, user experience design, design thinking, human-centred design, learning technology specialities, knowledge management, information architecture, content management, behavioural science, organisational development, career development, performance consulting, technical writing… The list is endless, as people keep inventing new subsets and disciplines.

Fundamentally, we teach people things at work because we want them to change what they do. And we want them to change what they do to support the goals of their workplace. This could be to help increase shareholder profits, or it could be to serve the public in some way. It generally involves being more productive, less wasteful, safer, more transparent, or having better documentation.

To do this, we need to make sure the learners buy what we’re selling. Learning is an effort that we want them to make. So learning design means we need to understand what motivates the learners to make that effort, so we can tie the learning into that for them. It’s easier in some ways than it sounds, because people mostly love learning. They’re often a bit gun-shy, from having encountered terrible workplace learning, but gaining new skills is usually inherently enjoyable.

And once we have the learners’ buy-in, we need to provide the service we have offered: learning activities that give them the skills and knowledge they need. Easier said than done, but that’s the main point of just about every post I make here about learning, so I’m mostly skipping past this bit. But one key point here is that we don’t usually know all about the things we are teaching. Learning designers know how to develop activities that support learning. We work closely with subject matter experts (SMEs) to get the expertise around what we are teaching. Subject matter experts and learning designers together can achieve what neither can do alone, them because they don’t have the expertise on learning, and me because I don’t have the expertise on the skills or knowledge we are teaching.

Finally, to tell whether our work has succeeded, we evaluate, so we can tell what works, and what doesn’t. This is where research-based practice lives. By reading research about what works, and by recording what we do and analysing the results, we can build our understanding of what helps workplace learning projects to succeed.

Learning design is constantly working on a shoestring, because few organisations really prioritise good training. It is constantly changing and evolving, as jobs change, as technologies provide new media for instruction, and as concepts of learning and teaching develop. I love the constantly new and fresh work I do, and I feel immensely privileged to work with so many amazing experts. It’s never the same from month to month, and I am constantly changing my approach as I learn more about what works.