Thirdy participants from companies and higher education institutions attended the workshop on "The Theory and Practice of Learning Design" at the OEB 2011 conference, last wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011 (see http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2362 for all activities, presentations, etc.)

The morning session included an overview of the field by Grainne Conole, together with presentations of five (5) pedagogical patterns, associated scenarios and tools that allow for creation of learning designs (as well as deployment and enactment in some cases.

The afternoon session included hands-on work in groups, followed by sharing of the conclusions and reflection of the working groups.

The workshop showed that the field of learning design is mature for adoption by the community, although there are still many concerns on the trade-offs (what is the real benefit of a practitioner when adopting a learning design approach?)

Some arguments in favor of a trade-off favorable to learning design are:

- Make the design knowledge explicit for self-reflection and sharing among practitioners

- Be able to deploy and adjust the learning designs in different environments and courses without additional effort

- Be able to take advantage of good teaching/learning practices in the form of simple learning designs (pedagogical patterns)

However, there are still concerns on

- Whether learning design is another iteration of the classical instructional design approach (or it should be focused as "design for learning")

- How learning designs can be refined, changed or adapted in a simple way, when teachers find out that there are problems or new conditions emerge.

Overall, a very interesting workshop, that will be followed by other activities of the Stellar-funded Learning Design Grid Theme Team (journal special issue, book, panel in ICALT 2012, summer school in Greece in 2012, etc.) http://www.ld-grid.org/home