Gilly Salmon (2002) created a framework that identifies five developmental stages that can occur in online learning. In each stage the learner is supported by the scaffolding of e-tivities and tutor/moderator involvement. Each stage requires different involvement from the learners and tutor/moderator and different e-tivities or online tasks.

Stage 1:Access & motivation

Expectancy theory (Biggs 1999) motivates some learners at this stage so providing clarity of purpose for an e-tivity is critical and how it links to the rest of the learning in the course. Other learners are motivated by 'achievement' or 'competency' and so the e-tivity must…

How and when will learning design catch up with today’s students?

Made over three years ago, this video really makes you think about about how behind our students many of us as educators could be in terms of technology use!

Despite what may seem to be obvious benefits, it appears that many tutors still feel that the introduction of online or technological aids will reduce the ‘human element’, decreasing the richness and context of the learning experience.

Indeed this blog post also seems to summarise the threat of competition between traditional teaching and the growing expectations…

The July 2011 MoodleMoot conference was a great opportunity to meet people and learn about what's new. There are two key things that I came away with after the conference.

Firstly, there are many different names for our role, some with really complex sounding names. There are instructional designers, learning designers, educational technologists, e-learning specialists, Moodle administrators and so many other roles that all more or less include elements of teaching and learning support and development. In many cases one person takes on all of these roles and more – because that one person is the whole team. Learning works are…

How much of your current material is essential for students to complete assignments?

I have become interested recently in exploration of the idea of facilitators as 'coaches'. Within this metaphor, the facilitator links students to the experiences or practices which build competence within the desired area for development. I believe that effectively designed programmes contain the ability to integrate, overlap and combine topics and levels of learning, with a view to increasing learner competence. Too often, only part of the learning material is engaged in - the part directly relating to the assessment!

Although strategy and preparation play a large role, a…

Buzz words in education come and go, and at the moment the phrase "embedded literacy" is being liberally tossed around. It sounds good, but what does it actually mean?

Let's start with literacy. Traditionally, many educators, researchers, journalists, employers, policy makers and students have worked off the assumption that literacy is a fundamental life skill you can acquire, preferably in school, and use in your day-to-day life. Essentially, literacy is something you can measure. Some people have more of it than others. Those individuals, and nations, that have "more" literacy have economic advantages. National and international literacy surveys tend to rank…

Peter Goodyear comments here that "whilst we should not fool ourselves into believing that we can design learning, (only learners can learn), we can and should design opportunities for learning: tasks and environments that promote productive learning."

This sounds more of a constructivist design approach than an objectivist design approach to learning. Instead of learning as a transmissive act of knowledge passed from teacher to learner, this seems more about providing a rich context for learning to occur - what the learner does is not always what the teacher planned.
But can you have both an objectivist and…

What is learning design?

I think of learning design as the creation of a course structure or content that helps learners learn. This is achieved by increasing student interaction with the content thereby allowing greater and deeper processing of the material to achieve particular learning outcomes. My experience designing and writing materials for an online English Language course was an experience in applying those ideas. In that programme we followed a task-based approach, however other approaches could be taken to help learners. Other lessons I'd developed as a teacher and an MA (Applied Linguistics) student sought to do…

I like this quote from Laurillard (2009) pg 44, where she says 'I think blended learning will never go away... and for some courses, some contexts, a blend which is 90 per cent conventional and 10 per cent digital is probably right and you'd get the reverse for other kinds of course. So it's entirely up to the particular context what kind of blend you have and we've just got to get practised at being able to find the right blend for the right course and context.'

For me it's about designing for your specific context. What…