A big thank you to everyone who attended the JLDHE Reading Club on Wednesday 14th May. We were a small, but engaged and engaging, group, which allowed for wide-ranging discussions sparked by the chosen reading: The Transformative Potential of Design Thinking in Learning Development. It was also a pleasure to be joined by Lee Fallin and Catherine Turton, the authors of the opinion piece.
Lee and Catherine opened our discussions by explaining how the inspiration and idea for their opinion piece began – with during a meeting at ALDCon, which sparked continued conversations on learning design which eventually led them to publish their thoughts with JLDHE. A great example of the community inspired by ALDinHE!
Next, Lee and Catherine were asked where they see learning design fitting in with existing roles and professions such as Learning Developers, Educational Developers and Academic Developers. In response, they gave a convincing answer that learning design impacts and influences all these roles and HE education / educators more broadly. The authors argued that design is inherent in everything we do in higher education and that, therefore, everyone is a learning designer to some extent.
This then led onto a great philosophical conversation around the future of Learning Development and the skills, competencies and experiences that future Learning Developers would need in the continually changing HE landscape to allow us to best support students. We were left with a final question to reflect on: are we now in a stage of LD 2.0?
To continue this conversation, our Reading Club Co-Host, Steve Briggs, has a forthcoming Take5 which delves further into the notion of pedagogic eras – keep your eyes peeled for that!
The next Reading Club will take place on Wednesday 9th July (17:30-18:30).
Please book a free ticket via the ALDinHE website. You will be notified in advance of the meeting with a selection of JLDHE articles for you to choose from. We will then confirm the piece with the most votes. The Zoom link, to access the meeting, is provided via your ticket.