Category: Learning design

EAUC Conference 2024: Reflecting and connecting with sustainability.

Catriona Matthews and Paul Astles  ~ Learning Designers

From the 25th to 27th June 2024 we travelled to the University of Winchester for The Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education (EAUC) conference and its 20th birthday celebrations. As well as the usual conference fare, we faced moral quandaries in an SDG focused game where we had to take on the role of global powers and negotiate to narrow down the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to just 6, we bopped to a silent disco, sipped on coffee from cups made of recycled chewing gum, and enjoyed some fantastic vegan cookies courtesy of the conference’s plant based catering approach. Continue reading “EAUC Conference 2024: Reflecting and connecting with sustainability.”

Fabulous formative failure

Michael Collins  ~ Senior Learning Designer

Last July I had the privilege of attending the Playful Learning 2023 conference for the second time, once more bearing a bulging bag of microphones and a question. Previously Dr Mark Childs and I asked attendees about their favourite games, what they loved about them – and how that love influenced their teaching practice. This time, we wanted to go to a place oft visited, but rarely discussed – failure. Specifically, fabulous formative failure. 

Coaxing attendees to record at our booth we asked: 

        • What (specific example) has been your most fabulous formative failure?  
        • What did you learn from it? 
        • Where do you think failure sits in learning through play, and learning in general? 

Continue reading “Fabulous formative failure”

Evolving design: shaping our work around a service-led model

Gerald Evans ~ Head of Learning Design

Since 2020 our experiences as a Learning Design (LD) team have been heavily influenced by much of our work moving online. The pandemic led to us resetting how we operated and in particular required us to find effective online mechanisms for running collaborative sessions while continuing to have the richness of conversations needed for learning design to be successful.

We’ve achieved this through a combination of intentional and emergent activity over the period since 2020. Intentional in that we’ve been consciously moving all of our learning design activity away from face-to-face delivery. And emergent in that we’ve learnt as we’ve gone along, and tried and tested out many online tools and approaches before settling on the core parts of the toolkit that we now work with. Continue reading “Evolving design: shaping our work around a service-led model”

Virtually reality: Learning while we play with VR at work

Mary Simper and Paul Astles  ~ Learning Designers

Who knew that meeting other humans inside a virtual world could create a sense of togetherness and promote positive wellbeing. Well, it turns out that it can. The Learning Design team have been experimenting with the use of virtual reality (VR). This article will explore how it made us feel, some of the limitations of using VR, and some possible use cases we have identified from our experiences. We’ll also share our own experience of using VR to help us plan and write this blog post.

We’re keen to hear about your experiences of the technology too so look out for the call for thoughts a little later. For now, let’s start where all good stories start, with a little bit of genuine humanity.

Continue reading “Virtually reality: Learning while we play with VR at work”