As a child, I dreamed about being a teacher. What I thought planning teaching would be like, was that a teacher would tell children new things and then give them nice exercises they could practise their new skills with. And of course, an exam would be compulsory. All the activities would happen in a very traditional classroom.

Elementary school class in Finland, 1933. Finnish National Board of Antiquities.  A collection of images from history, Pietinen’s collection.

Later on, I can say my dream has more or less come true: I am a qualified teacher, though not a class teacher, and I even work in teacher education. At the end of my M.Sc. studies, I got very interested in learning design as I was studying learning analytics for my master’s thesis. The connection between the successful use of learning analytics and learning design is significant. For example, to get reasonable analytics out of an online course, the course has to be designed so that analytics even forms. In the project, I worked on at the time, was found that taking that point into account, the quality of courses increased. It may not have been a consequence totally of learning analytics itself but the fact that teachers had to re-design their courses. It was not possible to continue business as usual with them due to analytics which led to re-thinking the whole structure of a course and justification of pedagogical choices.

In this week’s PBL group work we approached the given scenario with a starbursting method in the Mural. We were using questions about why, who, what, how, where and when at the beginning of the design process. We generated different kinds of questions focusing on the scenario. Then we had several voting sessions and we selected the questions we would like to concentrate on. As a final product, we created a Genially presentation. It is not meant to be a finished pedagogical script, but give something to think about if you are starting a design process.

There is a lot of pedagogical models and design templates available to support designing your own course. Take a look at the Universal Learning Design Guidelines, the ABC Learning Design or Dialogical, Digital and Deep learning (DDD) models, for example. In Tampere Universities, we have published a planning template of a course available on our TLC website. These all are just some tools to help a teacher to design their courses, but not “the only truth”. 

The design process is not meant to be a one-time experience but a continuous process that includes continuous assessment and evaluation of pedagogical choices made. The teaching situations vary and that also leads to changes that sometimes are very ad-hoc kind of. Some of the new experiments that follow the quick reaction to changes may be found very good and then turn to good practice. Teachers should be ready for the experiments even if there was not some kind of special situation going on. Still, the design of a course can not stand only on experiments but well-considered pedagogical design.