Undertaking a learning design of your BOC

At the early stages of creating a BOC a learning design meeting will be planned. Once the course has had sign off through the course specification document, the Senior Producer responsible for the course will set out a learning design meeting to help structure and scope out the aims for the course.

This will involve a short demonstration of the learning journey of a user completing a course in OpenLearn and the key elements of the course design - Learning outcomes, Activities, Quizzes. It will also show the user journey to gain a Statement of Participation [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] and Digital badge on the OpenLearn Profile.

Next in the Learning design we will look at your course in detail and help structure this as best we can at this stage. It may mean we discuss AV or look at what the OpenLearn team can create in-house. Really this depends on the course and the authors, you may be early on and just like some advice. We are here to help at all stages of the course production.

A good thing to undertake in the learning design is the Activity Planner, the below categories represent different types of activities that learners can engage with in the course, each providing a distinct set of pedagogical benefits. Here you will find some explanations of each category and the type of activities that fall within it:

We recommend early on in the planning stage of the course to undertake an activity template this is designed to allow authoring teams to think about the activities that may be involved in a BOC and how this feeds into overall course outcomes. Is the learner being asked to watch a resource and comment? or are they being asked for some real world testing and feedback? Activity template guidance

Although at this stage any activity template is likely to change, it is still helpful in identifying the key features of the course. When repurposing existing material, it might seem obvious to start from the material which already exists, but this has the potential drawback of simply repeating material without giving due attention to the learning outcomes of the BOC and how they might differ from those of the existing material.

Each BOC will have a Learning Design Workshop at the beginning of the production cycle, led by an OpenLearn Senior Producer, who will be able to provide relevant learning design template documents, such as the activity planner, prior to the workshop.

The workshops are an opportunity for author teams to work creatively together using particular learning design tools. The outputs feed into a Learning Design Plan and production specifications. 

The high-level design tools we use in a learning design workshop include: 

• Challenges, risks and opportunities
• Student profile
• Activity Planner.