Learning by design

Induction workshop

10 June 2004 - Croydon campus
Swinburne University

Learning by Design Workshop - the purpose

The purpose of the Learning by Design Workshop is to enhance the knowledge and skills required by TAFE staff to design creative and innovative delivery strategies to meet learners’ needs. The focus is on design and innovative thinking strategies to develop activities and methodologies which engage the learner and support their development of design and innovation skills. Back to top

Learning by Design: An Overview

The competitive and changing work environment of the 21st century has significant implications for employee skills. To maintain employability in today's changing job environment, employees need broader generic skills on top of job specific skills.

Traditionally, all trades and occupations have been defined in terms of the technical knowledge and skills that they required, not design. Training provided the technical knowledge of what you had to do. The knowledge of how the work was done, ie the process you had to go through, was seen as a less important by-product.

Perspectives are now changing. We now recognise the critical nature of those ‘process skills' and the need to make them explicit and visible. This has happened for several reasons.

• Technical knowledge changes very rapidly. It is now important to have the skill to transfer the knowledge from one area to another within the same job or moving to a different job.
  
• The second reason is that jobs are changing or becoming obsolete. The people who did those jobs can no longer use their technical knowledge but they can use the process knowledge they have acquired in the workplace to do new jobs in the same industry or other industries.

The theme of innovation is everywhere these days – in magazines, books, articles, conferences, websites and government direction and policy. To innovate, being innovative, and innovation are all processes that have been integrated into industry thinking, education and government policy. The Minister for Education and Training Lynne Kosky, from the State of Victoria in Australia , made it explicit in a speech in early 2003 that an excellent education system by being innovative and creative would produce better outcomes for students.

Design is an area of fundamental importance to an innovation economy. It is a vital step in the innovation process – the process of transforming ideas into practical and commercial realities. It therefore plays a key role in shaping underlying competitiveness across a range of industry sectors and consequent new demands on education and training.

The aim of this program is to enhance the design thinking of Vocational Education and Training (VET) practitioners in Victoria and to promote the value of design in education and industry. The program's purpose is to develop the knowledge and skills required to apply design and innovative thinking to participants' workplace practices and processes. For teaching staff, this could mean building structured learning experiences, with a focus on design and innovative thinking, into the delivery of their programs.

Source: OTTE (2004) Learning by Design: Workshop for TAFE Staff

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Design Process & Core Skills

The following skills are known as design process skills. They are also known as innovation@work skills because if the design process skills are used systematically in any context where ideas need to be generated and developed, innovative ideas will emerge.

The word design is both a noun and a verb and has multiple senses. In relation to teaching and learning, design means the making or way of making an end product, object, concept or proposal. It can also mean a way of knowing and producing knowledge.

Design based learning focuses on the learners' discovery through self-awareness, motivation, relevance and action. It is about having the ability to integrate ideas from a wide range of fields and applying them to new contexts. Unlocking the design potential of learners is a key role for teachers as they move towards a more facilitator model of teaching. This can be achieved by using learning technologies and questioning strategies that explore different ways of looking at a problem, and by encouraging learners' to explore the unfamiliar. This type of learning is based on productive thinking where problems are explored by asking ‘How many different ways can I look at this? How can I rethink the way I see this and what designs can I come up with?'

Teachers can encourage learners to design by giving them the freedom to think, argue, make mistakes, go to different places and find ways of finding solutions rather than grasping the first seemingly correct answer. In this sense solutions may be new ways or ideas or the new use of an old idea and which adds value. Thus design learning can produce innovative outcomes.

The core design skills are:

1. Interpret the context, the background, the future.
   The need for a new idea can come from an observed need, an opportunity or a brief. Interpretation covers the stage of identifying a need or opportunity and researching to find out what is possible.
2. Generate and select one idea or more.
   For the creative output of workable ideas, two stages need to be applied.
   • Divergent thinking - the ability to think of many original, diverse and complex ideas)
   • Convergent thinking - the ability to logically evaluate, critique and choose the best idea/s from a range
3. Collaborate with others to develop the idea.
   Actively seeking out advice and feedback from others. Effective collaboration relies on careful selection of the right people and networks. It should encourage information sharing and feedback on ideas.
4. Reflect on the idea.
   Reflection is the process of synthesising your own thoughts, the feedback from others and any other information, into a combined response. It requires time and space and is very often not scheduled into ‘work' time.
5. Represent the idea to test and promote it.
• Idea is worked into a detailed description, plan or model with accompanying data.
• Idea is presented and promoted to interested parties.
6. Evaluate the idea.
   Ensuring the finished idea/design meets the requirements of the interpretation stage. Performance measures or key criteria can be used to evaluate.

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