Learning design patterns – keeping it simple

Writing about web page /stevencarpenter/entry/e-orientation_event_notes/

Over the last two days the E-learning Advisor Team have been presenting to and discussion with a group of Warwick lecturers as part of an eOrinetation programme. One of the recurring features of this was that lecturers would describe a favoured approach to teaching, in quite simple and abstract terms, and this would provoke a discussion of ways of implementing that design pattern.

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A great example of this came from Les Warrington of the Warwick Manufacturing Group. He described the following pattern:

1. Divide the students into two groups;
2. Assign a different resource to each group (perhaps presenting something from two different perspectives);
3. Send the groups away to prepare a report on a single topic based on the resource given to each group;
4. Bring the groups back together to present and compare their reports.

Some may think that such a simple description would be inadequate. I disagree for the following reasons:

• Warwick has a big diversity of teaching contexts, each with its own very specific characteristics;
• our lecturers are smart enough to be able to instantly see a pattern and know how it applies (or not) to their own context;
• further subject specific detail about the pattern should be created locally within the context of the department as it is used – this knowledge could be shared, but the first objective is for people to take the idea and run with it in their own direction;
• giving too much detail in the first instance discourages people from considering the pattern in their own context, and discovering new things about it;
• the best patterns will come from lecturers themselves, we don't want them to have to do too much work in describing them.

Why is this of interest to the ELAT? If we can effectively capture the popular teaching patterns, it will be easier for us to give advice on how technology can be fitted into an implementation of them. We may even be able to turn some of those implementations into templates that can be reapplied and modified. In fact we already do this with one core pattern – the module (and its web reperesentations). Note that we have no interest in giving people authoritative advice on which patterns are best, that advice needs to be generated by people out in the teaching context, in departments and other groups.

Having a common approach to this will make our work much easier, and increase the efficiency with which IT is introduced into current practices to improve efficiency and quality.

: 13 Apr 2005 09:59 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem