Thoughts on Critical Learning Design from the RethinkLD team
For me, critical learning design is about challenging our assumptions about instructional design processes, the teaching and learning environments that we build, and the artefacts that we’ve come to expect in a teaching and learning experience. What are the things that we think are important but maybe aren’t? What aspects are timeless, and what aspects no longer make sense when we embrace openness? How can we challenge these things in an inclusive and participatory way?
I’ve always hoped that openness would provide more of an impetus for innovation in teaching and learning. Certainly in my practice, it has changed the way I design my pedagogical approaches, strategies, resources, and assessment methods. Open resources and technologies can be used to support and enable active learning experiences, by presenting and sharing learners’ work in real-time, allowing for formative feedback, peer-review, encouraging learner contributions, and ultimately, promoting community-engaged coursework. Yet, open textbooks, in very traditional forms, remain a dominant theme in open discourses. I joined this project to consider and contribute to exploring how critical instructional design might be used to rethink course resources and design methods, and further the maturation of instructional design in light of open educational practices.
Much instructional design today is embedded in thought structures and processes of an earlier era. Too often we remain bound up in a project management mindset and an instructional development process focused on highly predetermined learning activities and outcomes in a world that demands creativity and critical insight. In addition, many of the resources available to instructors and students in instructional design are based on traditional course structures and set faculty and learner roles. My hope is to be part of the development of a living resource for instructors, students and practitioners that both explores and models alternative approaches to instructional/learning design, in the form of an untextbook. The term “untextbook” is a placeholder for an open, creative, community-developed and -maintained resource that advances theory and practice in critical instructional/learning design.
For me critical approaches to learning design means thinking about ways to open up our spaces or make them more permeable. I feel we are often constrained by technology, institutional policy or other traditional expectations about learning – be it responses to academic integrity or assessment. I am always trying to think about design that can open up barriers, perceived or real, so that we can invite learners in to take more ownership of their learning. This project takes one traditional element that often defines our learning spaces, the textbook, and asks us to rethink how it can be more open and sustainable. As a designer I wonder how rethinking one of our fundamental learning resources may open up new possibilities for practice.