Why you have heard the words ‘learning design’ more than ever before, and why it is here to stay

After the events of 2020 and 2021, there is newfound respect, admiration and awareness of the work done by educators. Teachers have been the backbone of higher education institutions for many years, but they have found a new relevance in supporting students through the post-pandemic landscape.

The result of this pandemic has meant new ways of teaching and techniques to engage remote learners have had to be discovered. A lot of this work has to do with course design and preparing teaching materials for a new mode of delivery and being responsive to shifting requirements. Learning designers are often tasked to assist educators with this work and to translate, inspire, reimagine and rethink different ways to help student learning.

The activities that learning designers produce are often novel and innovative student experiences and learning outcomes. Curio has a long history of providing learning design expertise and support to institutions. Much of this support is down to celebrating the current teaching excellence within an institution; a good learning designer serves to showcase, enable and further expand the best ideas from the minds of educators.

Fundamentally, Curio believes that good learning design enables good teaching, employs the right technological solutions and is supported by learning and teaching research. Learning design is a complementary skillset, that allows everyone to improve their capacity to deliver exceptional learning, regardless of their subject matter expertise. Learning Design capability is increasingly in demand, yet requires a connection with literature, research, and engagement with the contemporary best practice.

With this in mind, Curio has developed a short course, The Art and Practice of Quality Learning Design, available now at Curio Academy. This was developed by our expert team of global learning designers who have designed thousands of hours of learning for institutions all around the world.

This course aims to dispel some of the myths around what learning design means, promote new ways of thinking about learning design as a practice and provide learners with a practical toolset they can test, iterate upon and deploy. We hope it inspires many with the confidence to consider learning design as a viable career path to meet their current need.

The course runs for four weeks, and you will be supported by a team of expert facilitators and vibrant webinars designed to get you thinking and practising learning design techniques. There is time and space to experiment and develop formative techniques and time-saving tactics to help you become better at designing for learning.

Curio believes this is the premier learning design course currently available as it is taught by existing learning designers – many with an academic background. The course sits at the nexus of the most up-to-date research literature, current best practices around learning design, and is informed by learning sciences. This course was built for adult learners and provides the on-demand, rich experiences that working professionals require.

Curio believes that the hardest people to teach are teachers – and perhaps the hardest are the people that help teachers teach! As learning designers, we aim to practice what we preach and we have put a lot of love, thought, and care into the design of this course. Therefore, we aim not only to instruct but model what we can see as quality learning design.

We hope you enjoy this course, as much as we have enjoyed building it!