Learning design

What is learning design?

Your course may be very short, simple and straightforward.

However, you still need to think about the learning design and how your audience might benefit from a well-designed resource. The Learning Design team at the OU has a blog that includes learning design resources that you might find useful. 

Some key points you need to consider are:

• your course’s audience and its purpose
• developing your course’s structure, including your learners’ journey through it and how to build up their knowledge (known as ‘scaffolding’)
• developing clear learning outcomes and interesting activities
• using plain English, making your course straightforward to understand
• whether you’d like any kind of assessment.

Audience and purpose

You need to consider the audience and purpose of your course. It is important to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the purpose of your course?
• Who will study it?
• Why will they be studying it?
• What context will your learners be studying in – that is, when and how will they be studying? Do they have specific needs or constraints? 

You may have a specific target audience in mind with very particular needs or you might be aiming at a broader range of people who have a general interest in your subject.

You cannot possibly know the context of every potential learner studying your course. However, one useful tip is to think of ‘personas’ of specific users to help you plan how to make your course content accessible and engaging for everyone.

Developing a course structure

It is good practice to structure your course from the start. This is partly because moving things around might be more time consuming later.

Structuring a course can mean creating a storyboard and collating a set of materials before deciding how best to display and deliver them. It will also help you decide which Moodle resources and activities are the most suitable to use in each part of your course.

We recommend that your course has the following as a minimum:

• Course overview: A section at the start of the course that has useful information about it. Other names for this section could be ‘Introduction’ or ‘Before you start’.
• Learning outcomes: A list that explains to your potential learners what they can expect to learn by studying the course. Guidance on writing learning outcomes is available in another free resource on OpenLearn Create.
• Structured sections: Your course needs to have a straightforward logical structure that reflects the amount of material included and the time that your learners might need to work through it. This includes deciding how it is displayed onscreen: it’s easier to go through several hours of study by dividing the material into sections that start on a different page, whereas for a very short course, all the material could probably be on one page. Think about each of your learning outcomes, and how and when you’d like to address them – it can sometimes be useful to dedicate one section to each one. The content for each section should then be broken up into smaller sub-sections, suitable for reading on a screen – ideally with a catchy and engaging title. (Where we refer to sections here, you may prefer to divide your learning into weeks, units or topics, or something else.)
• Overview text: It’s helpful for your learners if you briefly introduce each section (or week or topic) to explains what they should expect to cover in it.
• Assessment and rewards: If your learners pass a quiz they can earn a badge or a statement of participation.
• Acknowledgements: An essential page if some of the resources you include are not your copyright; it is also important as a place to properly acknowledge who was involved in writing your course. An acknowledgments page should include information about authors, other contributors and a list of all the resources used for which you do not own the copyright, and have cleared the copyright to use. You need to include full attribution information for each resource used – title, author, source and licence – even if you have given attribution information with the resources elsewhere in the course, for example in a caption for an image). Good examples of acknowledgements pages can be found elsewhere in this guidance. 
• A list of references: For resources you have cited. References will show your course is based on credible, valid data as well as knowledge and experience of those involved in writing the course.

Using plain English in online writing

Writing for online learning is not like writing a book! 

To optimise learner engagement, you should write as simply and clearly as possible. Jargon and acronyms should be avoided. You should define any terms that may be new to your learners, or where you are using familiar language in an unfamiliar way.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when writing and editing for online:

• Brevity is especially important. Use short sentences and keep to the active voice as far as possible.
• Consider having only one idea per paragraph. You may feel that this is restrictive, but in general it’s advisable to reduce the amount of content delivered online.
• Avoid long paragraphs, enabling learners to scan the material to gain a sense of structure and context. Some learners become disengaged when faced with too much text on screen – most will read about 25% more slowly than when reading for leisure.
• Where appropriate, use bulleted lists rather than paragraphs because they are easier to read on screen.
• Use graphics and images to help illustrate important information.
• Make clear, distinct divisions in the text to aid readability online – this process is known as chunking. Think about using sections, sub-sections, sub-headings and boxes to help with this.
  Give each section, subsection and sub-subsection a concise and meaningful title as this will be visible to learners on the course navigation menu.
  Chunks of information must use common sense, logical organisation and consider convenience. Sometimes it may make sense to link out to external documents.
• Include linking sentences to link from one subsection page to the next and improve logical flow.
• Shorter pages may help your learners to work through the materials, but be careful that the line of the argument is not lost and that learners don’t have to flick from page to page too often. Avoid long pages, which tend to disorient readers and require them to scroll for a long time and remember what is off-screen. 
• Summarise the main points of the topic at the beginning and end of each section. You could list the learning outcomes that will be covered at the beginning. Rounding up the key points at the end will to help the learner to verify that they’ve engaged with all the necessary content.

The text must be learner-facing throughout. It should address the learner as ‘you’ and avoid the first person. 

For example, instead of: 

‘We mentioned earlier …’ 

Say:

‘You will have read earlier …’

Emphasise how learners should use the course material. Keep pointing learners to useful evidence to back up their learning, and present alternative perspectives to promote critical thinking, rather than simply presenting conclusions.

How many words?

A typical learner can absorb a maximum of 2000 words per learning hour. However, the ideal word count for an online course is between 1000 and 1500 words per hour of study.

This is because non-text elements – such as activities, video, audio, complex graphics and graphs – will all take thinking time and should be taken into account when writing. 

If your course includes a quiz you should consider that as part of your word count. 

So a 12-hour course with no activities, AV, interactives or complex graphics could consist of 24,000 words, whereas a 12-hour course with multiple activities and assets may be closer to 12,000 words – or perhaps even fewer.

Equality, diversity and inclusion

The Open University is committed to equality in line with the guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission and in compliance with the Equality Act 2010. There are nine protected characteristics under this legislation:

• age
• gender reassignment
• being married or in a civil partnership
• being pregnant or on maternity leave
• disability
• race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin
• religion or belief
• sex
• sexual orientation.

As you write your course we encourage you to consider the following points:

• Be aware of the protected characteristics listed above.
• Be sensitive to the risk of offending, patronising or excluding. Use plain English, avoiding jargon and figurative (non-literal) language. 
• Avoid instructions with visual or physical connotations/descriptions such as ‘Tick’ or ‘You can see below ...’. Instead use a more generic term such as ‘Select’ and ‘Below there is ...’. 
• Avoid instructions that refer to colour or sounds alone.
• Avoid condescending language (such as inappropriate use of the word ‘victim’). 
• Avoid Eurocentric or Anglocentric viewpoints. 
• Reflect the diversity of contemporary society and ensure accurate representation of cultures. 
• Avoid bias and assumptions. 
• Don’t assume that everyone belongs to the same family structure. 
• Use gender-neutral terms. 
• Avoid stereotypical images (such as depicting old people as frail). 
• Embed links under meaningful text, avoiding embedding links under phrases such as 'Click here’.

Learning outcomes

All courses need learning outcomes to allow the learner to understand what they can expect to learn from a course.

(If you're planning to create a guide or a handbook they won't require learning outcomes.)

Depending on the length of the course, up to five learning outcomes is usually recommended. Your course structure should be designed around them.

Categories for learning outcomes are:

• knowledge and understanding
• cognitive skills – reasoning abilities 
• practical and/or professional skills
• key skills, e.g. communication, teamwork, etc.

Learning outcomes should be phrased in terms of what the learner should know, understand and/or be able to do by the time they have successfully completed the course.

How to write learning outcomes

Effective learning outcomes contain three elements:

1. An introductory phrase, such as ‘Upon successful completion of this course, learners should be able to …’.
2. This is followed by the learning outcomes in a list, each of which consists of :
   • an active verb or phrase (examples below)
   • an object of the verb
   • a clause or phrase that provides context or condition.
3. Each learning outcome should be:
   • measurable
   • linked to the content, activities and assessment
   • uncomplicated – less is more.

Here's an example of a learning outcome:

Upon successful completion of this course, learners should be able to: 

• • describe the benefits and disadvantages of using OER in distance education.

What's an active verb?

Active verbs enable learners to use the activities to measure how well they’ve met the learning outcomes.

Verbs like ‘understand’, ‘know’ or ‘reflect’ are very difficult to measure.

Example of active verbs include:

• apply
• calculate
• compare
• define
• describe
• differentiate
• discuss
• evaluate
• identify
• implement
• write.

Activities

Activities are an important tool to help facilitate your learners’ understanding of the subject and should not be viewed as simply a ‘filler’. They are also a useful way to integrate formative assessment into your course content. 

Writing activities

With each activity you create you should consider including:

• a number and heading
• a suggested time that the learner should spend on it
• an activity question – a set of clear, sequential instructions to scaffold the activity task
• the answer to the question or a discussion about the issues it raises, as appropriate – this should refer specifically to the content of the activity and should not make any new teaching points, which can be developed instead in the main text that follows the activity.

With each activity you design you should:

• consider breaking down general questions into easy stages (perhaps with feedback for each one) and offering a relatively straightforward ‘first stage’ (e.g. a concrete rather than an abstract task)
• be precise about the task(s) involved to guide learners towards the correct response – it is helpful if questions are laid out clearly (e.g. with bullet points)
• ensure that the feedback clearly corresponds to the task design – so if the activity features a list of questions, for example, each one should be answered in the same order
• avoid activities that rely on the learners' interpretations or opinions rather than 
• consider asking learners to examine visual data and describe what they perceive – this give useful practice in analytical skills.

Activity types

What will you ask your learners to do?

There are several types of activities, each listed in the following table. Depending on the circumstances of how your learners will use your course, some activities might work better than others offline – if your course was complementing an existing class, for example. The table includes links to parts of the guidance that might best serve you making each type of activity.

Quizzes

Before you build a quiz online, it is important to work out what the quiz questions will be and to test them out with colleagues.

The primary purpose of quiz questions is for learners to check their understanding of the course materials and concepts. It can be quite difficult working out how to ask robust and useful questions that can be answered without asking learners to provide an essay response – it is usually possible to find a way to write a quiz for most topics but not possible to use quizzes for all types of knowledge.

It is a good idea to select one or two question types and get used to how they work before you extend the range of question types you use, especially if you are new to creating quizzes.

The following checklist is a guide to creating robust and effective quizzes:

• Identify the topics you want to cover in the quiz and write them down. You may do this as you are writing the course and the material is fresh in your mind.
• For each topic, draw up possible ways to ask the question, referring to examples of the different question types in use.
• Decide on the feedback type for each question.
• Draft questions for each topic in the question formats you have chosen.
• Write some hint text if you want your learners to have multiple tries at each question, and some feedback with the correct answers.
• Compile all the questions and organise them into a logical order.
• Ask colleagues to review the questions and feedback text. 
• Review and if necessary revise the questions, feedback text and assessment strategy in light of comments from colleagues.

Once you are happy with the questions, you can set up the quiz in your online course.

Completing the course

It is important to consider the assessment strategy for the course while the content is being written – a final quiz may not be the only thing that you want your learners to do in order to complete your course.

What will completion criteria for the course be? Course completion and assessment can be set up in different ways – examples include (but are not limited to): 

• visiting every page of the course
• posting on a blog or forum, or replying to someone else's post
• filling in a questionnaire
• participating (but not necessarily passing) a practice quiz 
• passing end-of-section quizzes
• passing a final quiz
• a combination of the above.

You should also consider what your learners earn once they have completed the course: for example, a statement of participation, a custom certificate and/or a digital badge.