"Discover" to "Design" - The Learning Design Journey

Research is a key component to understanding your learners and justifying your design choices. But the translation from "discover" to "design" is often a tricky road to navigate.

Design is a dynamic and multifaceted process that requires various iterations in order to become a tangible, functional, and user-centered end product. This journey from discovery to design is often challenging as it requires creativity, innovation, and problem-solving grounded in pedagogy and evidence. The first step in any design process is discovery or the research. This is where learning designers immerse themselves in research, analysis, and observation to understand the problem they are trying to solve. Effective learning design should always begin with a deep exploration of the problem space.

How do we use design to drive learning and direct learning outcomes?

One of the most challenging aspects to learning design is getting the problem space right. Often what we perceive is the problem for many users are but symptoms of something else. A way to offset this and allow for a more thorough understanding of users in an iterative space, is to conduct qualitative analysis through methods like focus groups and affinity mapping. This would allow designers to get closer to the users and dig beyond the what is simply said but to make connections and draw themes.

Learning Experience Design as an Iterative Process

As with any design process, learning design is also iterative. The work is never complete. Your learners change cohort to cohort thus it is crucial to constantly check-in and understand your users' needs - and of course there are frameworks like universal design for learning (UDL) of which could provide a solid foundation for design work to build upon. A good way to think about learning design is through the ADDIE model (Analysis, Development, Design, Implement, Evaluate). In the ADDIE model, the cycle is not linear and at any point, you can revisit the previous stage. However, many would say that the analysis stage is one of the most important and should be emphasized in the cycle because if the research was not done well, it is likely that you may have not pinpointed the right problem.