The field of "learning design" studies how to support teachers in devising suitable activities for their students to learn. The field of "learning analytics" explores how data about students' interactions can be used to increase the understanding of learning experiences. Despite its clear synergy, there is only limited and…

In a relatively short period of time, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become a considerable topic of research and debate, and the number of available MOOCs is rapidly growing. Along with issues of formal recognition and accreditation, this growth in the number of MOOCs being developed increases the relevance of assessment quality. Within…

Commitment, persistence and effort have long been considered critical components for an individual's academic success. Yet, according to the old proverb, two heads are better than one and collaborative learning may yield greater benefits than what might be achieved by an individual. Because of this, collaborative learning has been labelled a…

Learning design is growing in importance but is not yet widely adopted by teachers. This paper describes the development of a scenario-led learning design process, divided into two stages, which was implemented with over 500 teachers altogether from 15 European countries. Activity theory is used to explore the contradictions that arose when such…

Numerous models have been developed to help teachers efficiently and effectively design learning opportunities using new and emerging technologies. However, the literature to date makes little reference to the variation that exists within the models and frameworks as far as their scope, context, epistemological and pedagogical underpinnings and so…

Several decades of research and development have produced a rich ecology of technologies designed to support active, collaborative constructionist pedagogical practices. Nevertheless, many teachers are reluctant to use these technologies in their teaching or fail to devise learning designs which leverage their qualities. We argue that this tension…

Extending teaching beyond the classroom walls has been known for its potential to promote inquiry learning in various disciplinary domains. Current technologies can enhance these benefits, especially by enabling supports for seamless learning between contexts. But even without technology, teachers tend to refrain from implementing outdoor inquiry…

Numerous research publications have mentioned the need to prepare teachers to design and enact technologically enhanced learning experiences for students, thus increasing their academic performance and their engagement when learning. This paper addresses the crucial issue of how to train pre-service and novice teachers effectively to become good…

The incorporation of advanced information and communication technologies into the field of education has made the design and deployment of courses and instructional units more and more complicated. In order to support such complex task, methods and techniques have been proposed in the last years for the standardization, formalization and modelling…

Educators of all sectors are learning designers, often unwittingly. To succeed as designers, they need to adopt a design mindset and acquire the skills needed to address the design challenges they encounter in their everyday practice. Human-centred design (HCD) provides professional designers with the methods needed to address complex problems. It…

Improving teacher design promises to be a scalable, sustainable approach to building capacity amongst a workforce faced with complex and evolving drivers of change in higher education worldwide. While design has long been recognised as a routine part of teaching, there has been renewed interest in supporting and understanding the design work that…

Learning Design (LD) research is oriented to support teachers in designing their teaching with the aim to provide a sound pedagogical background and to make effective use of resources and technologies. In spite of the significant number of LD approaches and tools proposed so far, their adoption is still very limited and this represents an unsolved…

Learning design is a research field which studies how to best support teachers as designers of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) situations. Although substantial work has been done in the articulation of the learning design process, little is known about how learning designs are experienced by students and teachers, especially in the context of…

This paper reports on an iterative design-based research project to develop an online design tool (the Learning Designer) to support "teachers as designers." The aim is to evaluate the potential of the tool to develop and support a knowledge-building teaching professional community. The Learning Designer was embedded and evaluated…

This paper presents the Design for Somebody (DfS) philosophy targeted to iterative, user-oriented development of solutions for special user groups. In this article, the DfS is discussed using a game development context. The paper gives concrete examples how the DfS can be used in developing motivating serious games. The paper presents three games…