Learning design

For the last couple of years, I have increasingly come across the words learning design. Superficially it appeared to me just another name for instructional design or perhaps instructional design underwent a branding exercise and is now reborn as learning design.

However, on scratching the surface I found that there are differences, subtle differences perhaps but differences nonetheless.

So, what is learning design and how is it different from instructional design? Actually, before we get to that let's think about what does a design do? A design aims to solve a problem for the user by taking in consideration the user's requirements. Think of interior design - It is a solution for how you want your home or office to be given your life/work style. Furniture design aims to solve a problem for the targeted users. And so on and so forth.

So, learning design is about providing solutions to learning requirements of the learner. But isn't that what we do in instructional design you say! Yes and no. In instructional design, we do analyse our learners but we do the analysis based on what we know about the learner and our own assumptions about a typical learner. In learning design, we assume nothing. We talk to our learners and we find about what they like and don't like about learning. We try to find out what motivates them, what they find interesting, what sort of learning environment they prefer etc. This is a step we do not do in traditional instructional design. After gaining all this information about the learner we start with developing ideas on how best to provide learning keeping the information about the learner in mind. Once we zero in on an idea we try them out and see where we are falling short. Then we improve on that shortcoming. We continue this process of identifying the shortcoming and resolving it till we come to the definitive version of our idea. After that learning design follows a method that is like the ADDIE model in that we implement the idea and then evaluate it.

So, as I mentioned earlier, the subtle differences between instructional design and learning design are that:

  1. Learning design puts a lot more emphasis on thoroughly understanding your learner
  2. Learning design isn't as formulaic as instructional design
  3. Learning design encourages prototyping and gradual success of the best way to present learning
Learning design is becoming more and more popular because the cookie cutter approaches advised by instructional design are no longer providing desired results. This may not be true for individuals who were/are thinking outside the box using instructional design methodologies and coming up with innovative solutions. Learning design gives designers the freedom to provide learning that would be of maximum use to the targeted learner because it has been developed keeping their individual preferences, motivations and requirements in mind. Is it more time consuming and probably expensive compared to straight forward instructional design methodology - for sure but it is what will set you apart and make the learning work for your learners.



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