Beyond learning design, landing learning in the real world

The task and the opportunity

I’m currently working on a large, publicly funded, research project (Project Soteria-Bluestone) as part of a team of gifted academics from a number of academic institutions, including my colleagues from the Centre for Policing Research and Learning at The Open University (OU).

The aim of this research is to bring together the best of academia and policing to transform the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO) and create better outcomes for the victim-survivors of these crimes.  

My academic and policing colleagues have significant experience in the study and investigation of sexual violence and in adult and police education between them. Daunting as the task of building such critical police learning systems and approaches sometimes feels, I know that the right people are working on the problem.

I’m confident that we’ll create a learning approach that offers a real possibility of transforming how RASSO investigators are trained and thus what they can bring to bear to deliver better outcomes.

Richard Harding
Research Fellow, Centre of Policing Research and Learning (CPRL), Open University

What we know

In our wider research we have developed a detailed understanding of the state of learning amongst RASSO investigators and of how they conduct investigations. One of the key findings is the need for investigators to understand the contexts of, amongst other things, victim-survivors, the crime itself, the circumstances of reporting and the potentially complex relationships between the parties involved, including the police, when conducting investigations. Only by understanding these contexts can investigators deliver suspect-focused, victim-centred, and context-led investigations. This concept of context resonates strongly with our task of learning design.  

We have found that in a world where experience, practical skills and peer-to-peer learning are highly prized, the formal learning and knowledge in the sense we’re trying to build is not always as highly valued. It’s often seen as a cost or an abstraction rather than as being an investment in individual and organisational capacity and capability (see for instance; Ryan and Ollis (2023), and Roberts, et al. (2016) for wider discussion on this point). These views are deeply embedded in policing’s cultures (for they are many and diverse). We also know¹ that whilst individual investigators express a strong desire to learn and keep their knowledge and skills up to date this is often not matched by the learning provision or offerings from their organisations. Even where offers do exist investigators are often unable to access learning because they feel the weight of their organisational and cultural expectations to prioritise other things. This is often to the detriment of their ability to engage formal learning.

I’m not suggesting that experience and peer-to-peer learning aren’t valuable routes to learning, but in a context where the imperative is to transform how investigators make sense of their world the perpetuation of what ‘has been’ is not the route to successfully embedding ‘what should be’. The irony that investigators are aware they need to learn new things to do things better but can’t access that knowledge because they’re too busy doing things the way they’ve always done them isn’t lost on us.

The challenge

Although this is one example, in a particular organisational setting, it illustrates a point that educators around the world face on a daily basis. Without taking account of factors beyond the actual crafting of learning material even the very best designs may flounder and fail to deliver their intent. The wider point is that learners come to learning from a variety of spaces and positions and not being sensitive to how these contextual effects mediate their ability to access and/or engage learning might mean we don’t deliver the learning we intended, as illustrated by the well-established but less well understood attainment gaps often seen between different socio-economic groupings of students accessing the same learning material.

Personas to the rescue

Here the OU’s model of learning design has proved useful as it explicitly requires the development of learner ‘personas’ to try to understand these factors. One of the early steps in the OU’s learning design cycle challenges us to explore who our learners are and to identify what they require to engage learning. Built from data, personas represent student architypes, not individuals, and they help us by acting as reference points to ensure that the learning design is focussed on what the learners want and value. By using these approaches, we are attempting to account for the complex landscape we are endeavouring to deliver learning into.

Richard Harding

Richard is a Research Fellow with the Centre of Policing Research and Learning (CPRL) within the Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) at The Open University. His research has centred on co-developing evidence-based approaches to organisational change with academic and policing partners.

He is currently working on Project Soteria-Bluestone, a large multi-institutional research project aimed a co-producing improvements in rape and serious sexual offence (RASSO) investigations with policing partners across England and Wales. Prior to joining academia, he served as a police officer in a large UK police service for 30 years.

Richard’s research interests include organisational learning and change, police legitimacy, and organisational and occupational cultures (particularly in law enforcement agencies).