For learning design projects, build the time to reflect on the past into your future

We deem someone an expert when they can apply an extensive range of experiences and knowledge to new contexts with ease. For learning designers, their knowledge will build from a base of theoretical pedagogical understanding. Their experience will have been gained from working with courses and academics across disciplines.

But, as a learning designer, how certain can you be that what you’ve designed has contributed effectively to the learning outcomes? After all, the students won’t necessarily engage with the designs for some time, and by the time they do, the learning designer will be busy working on another course.  

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The answer lies in explicitly embedding time into the scope of your current project to reflect on a previous project. 

The importance of reflective practice

• Learning from experience: Reflective practice enables us to learn from our experiences, both successes and challenges. By systematically examining what worked well and what did not, we can identify best practices and areas for improvement. This learning process is crucial for professional growth and the advancement of our field.
• Building a culture of continuous improvement: Embedding reflective practice into project scopes fosters a culture of continuous improvement within learning design teams. It encourages a mindset of curiosity and critical thinking, where team members are motivated to seek out new knowledge and refine their skills. A culture like this not only enhances the quality of our work but contributes to a more innovative team environment.
• Sharing is caring: Creating a platform or central space of reflections allows designers to upload their insights into effective practice. This expands the repository of personal reflections to the wider team and creates a rich archive of pedagogical approaches, helping put future projects in context. It also contributes to institutional knowledge and can be shared at conferences or published in educational journals, all enhancing the broader discourse on learning design.

Implementing reflective practice

• Scoping the reflection opportunities: Once a project is under way, it is extremely difficult to find and justify the time needed to work on something extra. But if the reflection time is factored into the scope of work at the beginning of a project, it becomes much more achievable. This of course requires a unit director or project manager to buy into the concept of reflective practice and provision the time into a scope. Adding a half-day into the scope of a six-week development block is an approach that has worked for us.
• Data collection and analysis: The most useful data will come from surveys and feedback from students and academic staff. The amount of time you have to design the questions, organise where and when students will respond to them and write up your findings will need to be factored into the scope. There is great skill in designing surveys to suit particular contexts – seeking feedback about an assessment, for example, will be different from seeking feedback based on engagement in an activity. The underlying point, though, is that you are trying to ascertain the student experience of the design you have implemented. Brookfield’s second lens of critical reflection may be useful in guiding the design of survey questions. Also important in the design is how long it will take a student to complete it; too long and you won’t get engagement, too short and you compromise validity. Over time, however, not only will you get better at designing questions, but you will also be able to reuse or tweak questions to suit the particular context you are evaluating. 
• Documenting reflections: Writing up a reflection is a skill in itself, and creating templates for doing so will help team members get the most out of the reflection. This is when reflection frameworks such as Kolb’s and Gibb’s may be useful in teasing out answers about what was hoped for in the design, compared with what eventuated. They can also provide a scaffold for considering if the designs may need to be altered for their next use. Adding the findings to the shared platform then allows other team members to expand their knowledge base of effective teaching and learning strategies, moving them closer to expertise.

Embedding reflective practice into learning design projects is essential for continuous improvement and professional growth. By taking the time to systematically evaluate the impact of our work, we can learn from our experiences and enhance the effectiveness of our designs. This practice truly allows a learning designer to trust that a strategy they endorse is backed not only by theoretical evidence but by contextualised evidence. 

However, the time and space needed to do so must be factored into a project’s scope of work. When we do this, we not only prevent designers from being overwhelmed with extra workload, but we encourage a habitual culture of effective practice. While this post is specifically about learning design, it is clear that it is a transferable process to most team cultures, both professional and academic in higher education. 

Paul John Gregory Moss, Richard McInnes and Simon Marek are managers of educational design at the University of Adelaide. 

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