EDU-40206: Online and Blended Learning Design

Week 4: Micro-lecture – ABC Learning Design Framework

Welcome to Week 4, micro-lecture: ABC Learning Design Framework. You've spent some
time looking this week so far at different learning design frameworks, but we're going to
focus on one that a lot of institutions have adopted or adapted, which is the ABC Learning
Design Framework. It's evolved from Laurillard’s Conversational Framework, which we're
going to talk about in more detail before we talk about ABC. And what I want you to think
about during this micro-lecture is why has the framework been split into the sections it has,
what areas do you make a lot of use of in your practice already, and what areas you would
like to make more use of, and how do the learning types impact the experiences of students
in their learning?

First, we're going to talk about Laurillard's Conversational Framework, which has several
kind of arrows going backwards and forwards between the teacher and the learner. So we
have a teacher's theoretical representation or concept. We have a teacher's experiential
environment or a learning environment. We have a learner's theoretical representation or
learner's concepts, and we have a goal-oriented behaviour which is a learner's practice. So if
we go from teacher's concepts to learner's concepts, that happens through theory and ideas
being shared. If we go from learner's concepts to teacher's concepts, we're talking about
students asking questions on ideas. To go from learner's concepts to learner's practice, we
need to talk about adaptation through experience and reflection, which gets the students
thinking between concept and practice. If we go from teacher's concept to the learning
environment, we're talking about adaptation of activities based upon things like reflection.
To go from the learning environment to the learner's practice, we're talking about goals and
feedback and then students' actions and revision. So you can see it's a cycle backwards and
forwards between teacher and learner, both within themselves and from one to the other.
And this was the foundational basis for the ABC Learning Design Framework.

The ABC Learning Design Framework was developed by a Young and Perovic in well, early
2015-16. And they've written many blogs about the kind of workshop setup that they use to
support based on the framework, which has six learning types, which are acquisition,
collaboration, discussion, investigation, practice, and production.

We're going to talk through each of those areas and what that looks like in practice now, so
you can get some ideas of what the framework is and how it can be used. Now, the first
type is acquisition. And learning through acquisition is what learners are doing when they're
basically listening or reading or watching demos. It's a more passive kind of learning, where
the students are acquiring the knowledge from another source, whether that be a human
being or a source of information like a textbook or a video or a podcast. So, acquisition is
that kind of passive learning, and it is things like reading books, listening to podcasts,
watching micro lectures, like you're doing now, those types of things.

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Collaboration is when students work together with a predefined goal of something that
they're going to work towards. So this is mainly encompassing things like group activity,
where students are working together to be able to work to a defined endpoint. So that
could be they could work together to produce a presentation. They could work together to
produce a quiz. They could work together to annotate a document or produce an
infographic. But essentially, they make use of other learning types to be able to work
together in an active way to be able to produce something at the end of it.

Discussion is something that most people will be familiar with already. That's where
students are articulating and sharing their ideas, their questions, they’re responding to ideas
and questions shared from the teachers and their peers, and they're going backwards and
forwards having a conversation about a topic. This can be done online as well as in person
using things like discussion forums. They could be discussing a question, an article, a topic, a
video, anything that you want them to, but they have something predefined that they need
to share their ideas and questions about and respond to the ideas and questions from
others.

Investigation gets students to go away and explore something. For example, they could be
asked to go and find a piece of text that links to a specific topic and they need to go away
and find that and compare different articles, for example, until they find one that they think
is suitable to meet the needs of the parameters that they were going away and
investigating. It's something that requires a very active process where students are
becoming the investigator of the situation and finding a solution.

Practice, now this applies to a lot of scenarios. A lot of what you're going to be asking your
students to actively do will involve them practicing a skill of some kind. It gives them a task
and a goal to work towards and then they practice using their knowledge and their skills
that they've learned to apply it to a scenario. So that can kind of come through self -
reflection, reflection from others, for example, peers or teachers or from the activity itself.
It's showing them how they could potentially improve it for the future after having an
attempt at applying it themselves. So this could be, for example, they do a practice quiz
where they answer questions based on their knowledge that they've gained to check that
they're correct and they get feedback based on which is the correct answers. It could be, for
example, a discussion where they're practicing applying a particular skill of setting out a
paragraph in a certain way, for example. It could be doing some self-reflection themselves.
Practice applies to lots of different activities and anything that requires the students to do
something that is practicing either applying some knowledge or a skill.

And then we've got production, which is where they consolidate their knowledge to
produce something at the end of it. So, for example, they could be asked to produce a
PowerPoint, to produce a quiz, to produce a written piece of work, a video, a podcast. It can
be done in groups, it can be done independently, but there is a resource at the end of it that
has been created as part of the production.

So those are the six learning types. And as I've probably alluded to already, activities don't
tend to just fall into the category of one or the other. So the ways of approaching using this

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framework, you can say, okay, I want to do a piece of acquisition here. I know that I want
them to do some reading. So I'm going to put that into my storyboard design for the first
part of the activity. And then I want them to collaborate together. So I'm going to think
about what I want to ask them to do to collaborate and you can go along that approach. Or
you can think about what it is that you want the students to do and then consider which of
the learning types it applies to. And quite often that can be more than one. So one activity
could be, for example, collaboration, discussion, practice and production. So you can
approach it based on an activity and then consider which of the learning design framework
learning types apply to that activity. And that can help you assess the balance you have
between things like acquisition and active learning. So it is a flexible framework that can be
used in several ways to help you consider what the students are doing and it is considering
the passive versus the kind of active learning types that students will be taking part in.