Trust the Teachers: A Collaborative Approach to Learning Design Solutions

Abstract

Crucial to any design is its intention, although the world will be the judge of its value. We try to make intention and outcome align, and in the context of learning design its value to the world will be some important advance in contributing to solving one of the many challenges to improving learning and teaching. This chapter focuses on the challenge of how to optimize the potential of digital learning technologies in education and offers collaborative learning design as an effective solution. This challenge is critical because digital technologies have huge potential to transform the effectiveness of education and its inequalities on the large scale. They also have the potential to exacerbate its problems and destroy its successes. Educators must be supremely vigilant to avoid the worst, and diligent to achieve the best. The chapter explains why educators should focus on collaborative learning design and clarifies its theoretical basis. It describes the evidence from experiments that evaluated teachers’ experience of a ‘co-designed massive open online collaboration’ and demonstrated a viable solution for professional development that can scale up teachers’ good local learning design solutions to improve the reach and effectiveness of student learning across the world.