Approaches that can help you grow your learning design capabilities in a more systematic way. Plus how to overcome common challenges and ensure buy-in from the team during times of change. Spoiler: Involve them!
This post covers how individuals and teams can transition from approaches that feel ad-hoc, individual or difficult for others to replicate, into structured systems that teams or entire organisations can utilise. It includes how to identify the need, frameworks to follow, ensuring buy-in and next steps.
Designing for learning is our generalised term for the process of instructional design, learning design, learning experience design, training and creating customer education. We use this single term to help cover the range of roles and sectors out there filled with people who are creating engaging, meaningful and authentic learning experiences.
There are often signs that your learning design processes have become inconsistent or inefficient. The most notable, negative impact is felt by your learners. They may have experiences that are jarring because of different approaches being followed during the design phase. This leads to the wrong kind of cognitive effort being used, where learners have to understand you and your process as much as the material or topic. That's the worst case scenario, but the top offender to avoid.
Less problematic, but still an organisational challenge, is where key lifecycle stages (such as design, production, delivery or evaluation) follow a different methodology and produce inconsistent outcomes. It's difficult to compare two learning experiences if they have followed very different paths. That means the good, and bad, bits may be lurking in an unobservable way.
More often or not, you'll identify the need for standardised learning design when your capabilities grow beyond the early stage. You'll want repeatable success, an induction for new teammates, a consistent learning experience, a unified toolkit across the team, or maybe just the confidence that if someone becomes unavailable, that any other teammate can step in and help out.
Standardised processes are also more efficient. Sometimes, we just need to optimise because of the available resources. We want, or need, to go faster, be cheaper or increase throughput. These can feel like negative aspects but they are also part of people working more collaboratively, together, sharing and repeating best practice.
The leading benefit is to reduce any unfair, and demanding, added load for learners grappling with anything beyond the topic studied. Some times should be desirably difficult, the learning, but not navigating through the learning journey. Consistency helps with this. It doesn't mean everything is the same, far from it, it means you are designing for flow, for uninterrupted learning and for the challenge to come from advanced understanding, nothing else.
Learners have to plan when, where and how to engage with the content. If there's no systematic thinking behind the design, there will be inconsistencies and disruption in their engagement. You can minimise these negative impacts by having a structured learning design system.
As your team grows, you'll onboard new members with a range of backgrounds, skills and experiences. It's refreshing to hear new perspectives, but it's also productive to work in similar ways. Always remain critical of your approaches, and evaluate in a timely format, but having a system in place transforms a team's productivity.
Success is not always measured by volume of learners, but it remains a popular route for courses designed for large enrolment numbers. Equally high are the number of learners who participate in on-demand learning or training packages. If you're working with a growing headcount of learners, you'll want to incrementally move forward systematic approaches to ensure you can grow with the requirements of a larger learner audience.
There are numerous ways learning design systems can materialise, this blog post speaks to three that are commonly utilised as teams and organisations develop their capabilities.
Standardised formats for session plans, outlines, or modules can become templates. These provide a way to define a 'base' experience and to articulate what 'usually' happens. The aim is to create a reusable pattern, or collection of approaches, that can be applied numerous times. Examples of popular templates include the activities that surround an assessment, a repeatable structure used to top/tail a topic, or week of learning or an activity that benefits from a known routine or procedure to ensure success. Creating templates takes a little investment, but 'dropping in' an hour, or more, of learning design is both rewarding for you and provides a more consistent learner experience.
An example template where there's a collection of items used systematically across five taught topics. Select an Image
Best practice, style guides, and instructional design principles can help us improve the experience of new team members joining, handover between colleagues and when a designer leaves the organisation. Guidance documents are the 'internal user manual' for the design team. They should be created collaboratively to ensure there is maximum buy-in to their contents. Once set, they can outline best practice, certain styles or approaches and the principles used by everyone.
Similar to an instructional design principle, there are existing frameworks that don't need to be re-created. These include overarching structures like ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation), SAM (Successive Approximation Model), or Codesign. The trick here is to evaluate how closely they are followed and to give yourself space to customise them, as needed. If you're not following any model, it's worth evaluating the impact. There may be a valid reason to have strayed from established processes, especially as the evidence matures for agile and iterative methodologies. The goal isn't to strictly follow a framework but to achieve team consistency and productivity with results that lead to positive learning experiences.
Coursensu D4 Framework is an example methodology to use for learning design Select an Image
Individuals and teams are often weary of change, especially if the benefits are unclear. The way to mitigate this is to ensure stakeholder buy-in from the outset. This is challenging if there are external pressures, however people do understand, but they'll still want to be involved in the process. Reduce resistance to change by empowering individuals, fostering shared thinking and collaboratively created outcomes as a result. This will reduce resistance, increase inclusion and still give space for sparks of creative ideation during the progress. .
Nothing is set forever and retaining the capability to change is important. Just like our own iterative frameworks (see above) we can live and breathe this ourselves, and how we work. Traditional, or 'set' processes can be vital, to reduce change for the sake of change. But they can still be evaluated, to ensure flexibility and adaptation are at the core of how we work. Build your templates and frameworks with this from the outset, and you'll be able to iterate and improve more smoothly in the future.
Just like the design systems we use - capture feedback, implement changes and find your own direction of travel. You live in a world of iteration for improvement, powered by feedback. Ensure you make space to capture feedback and then use these insights to inform the next iteration. You can make it explicit; 'we are learning' is a powerful way to show there's always scope or change.
'Eat the dog food' is a way of showing, in a highly visible way, that you believe in the power of iterative processes. Dogfooding sounds uncomfortable, but the idea is that something is so good, we use it ourselves. No need to open a can of mystery, just consider the value of iterating on your own processes and how this can become a story to tell to inspire others.
Before the development and implementation process, you'll want to ensure stakeholders understand the purpose, scope and process that will be followed. Great facilitation will be central to improving your processes. It may be helpful to make this a project - set a goal, a timeframe, some requirements. If everyone involved is signed up to these, then it'll help retain focus during the ideation, change process, evaluation and future iterations. If you just 'deliver' change to stakeholders, they may adopt it but they won't feel part of it. That will lead to reduced ownership, accountability and can result in negative sentiment.
Allow some space for adjustments and feedback. This could be a team discussion, a space in 1-2-1s or an open feedback policy. It depends on your context. Nothing is perfect from the start, which is why we iterate. More often the best approach is to avoid one big change and instead to filter in smaller, single changes that can be picked up faster and lead to broader adoption and behaviour change from those involved.
Use this as an opportunity for Instructional Designers and Educators to develop their skills, behaviours and knowledge. One approach could be peer exercise, which with appropriate groups can help more experienced peers support their colleagues. This also helps translate a framework into a more natural process which, along the way, may undergo tweaks as part of the training.
If you take anything from this post, it's to consider that as you reach a certain size, you'll need a system. Individual processes struggle when you add more people, more courses, more learners. Consider the benefits for you and those you work with, when it comes to following more systematic methodologies. Ensure you take a proactive and inclusive approach to adopting and continuously improving your systems.
Several useful methods and approaches have been listed in this article, but for further reading there are other voices in our community sharing their views on learning design systems. Some articles may also help you prepare for workshops with teammates.
🔗 Stepping Back to Move Forward: Applying Systems Thinking to Digital Education
🔗 Applying Systems Thinking to Learning Design - Matt Cornock, University of Leeds
🔗 Questions to ask alongside the ADDIE model (useful workshop content)
“avoid one big change and instead aim for numerous smaller changes that can be picked up faster and lead to broader adoption”
