Below you can find a necessary and significant call for chapters from folks at the University of Cape Town. As “learning designers, academic developers, instructional designers, curriculum designers, learning experience designers, learning experience engineers” and Centers of Teaching and Learning more broadly have carried institutions through the pandemic, while also facing incredible personal and institutional challenges themselves, this book stands to make visible what this work looks like, how it varies across contexts, how it is implicated in issues of power, opportunity, commitment, resilience, hegemony… and how those issues intersect with educational technology and design. CFP follows, but you can also find it here.

Call for chapters

We’re looking for learning designers, academic developers, instructional designers, curriculum designers, learning experience designers, learning experience engineers…  We don’t mind what you call yourself but if you create learning opportunities for students and staff in post-secondary institutions we want to hear from you! We’re keen to create a space for voices on learning design from a wide range of contexts. We invite you to share your practices and experiences, and to connect with a community of people across the globe who also do this work.  We’re hoping that together we can create the kind of book that you reach for when you need a new idea or want to be inspired by the innovative and responsive work of colleagues in challenging and exciting environments.   

Introduction

During the pandemic, the pivot to emergency remote teaching highlighted the depth and extent of inequalities facing communities, particularly in relation to access to resources and literacies for online learning in higher educational contexts. Imported solutions that failed to take into consideration the constraints and cultures of local contexts were less than successful. The paucity of practitioners with online learning design experience, training and education grounded in diverse contexts made local design for local contexts difficult to carry out.

Although there is substantial research and guidance on online learning design, there is an opportunity to create a text deliberately oriented to practice. Further, online learning design, as a field of practice and research, is strongly shaped by experiences and practices from the Global North. While many of the textbooks written from this perspective are theoretically useful as a starting point, the disjuncture between theory and practice for practitioners in less well-resourced contexts where local experiences are invisible, can be jarring.

#LDVoicesBook

Objective

The goal of this text is to offer a discussion of key themes shaping practice in online learning design, in the form of provocations by key voices in the field, and to offer chapters that illuminate or trouble these themes. Further, we seek to listen more closely to voices from the historical margins to understand better what learning design, as a practice, a field of research and process means in Africa, Asian and South America contexts. This is an opportunity to create a text deliberately oriented to practice, grounded in diverse contexts and showcasing a wide variety of learning design responses while remaining grounded in commitments to equitable access and success.

Target Audience

This book seeks to be useful for both staff and students in formal learning contexts such as diploma or certificate courses, we imagine that it will provide a useful handbook for those working in online learning design from learning designers to academic staff taking courses online to staff developers who support those processes.

Chapters

The book is structured around provocations, highlighting key concepts and debates related to that topic. We invite chapter submissions that respond to one of the provocations below.  This is not another theory book. We’re looking primarily for empirical, place-based pieces, practical advice and experiences  which are theoretically informed. Threaded through all the chapters, we expect border perspectives, peripheral views, equity considerations and the like to be incorporated. We would welcome interactive and multimodal components such as  images, videos, reflective exercises and other multimedia elements in your chapter, that can be used by readers for reflection or as teaching exercises.

Provocation 1: Learning Design as field, praxis and identity

Learning design has emerged as an area of work or practice, a space for research, and a marker of professional  identity.  How do you see learning design? How is learning design viewed in your context?  How do we, or should we, support the development of learning design? What models and assumptions underpin our work in learning design, and to what extent do these models support practice in your context? For this section, we are looking for chapters that offer insight into how learning design is located, functions and is valued in a variety of contexts.

Provocation 2: Humanising Learning Design 

Online learning faces increasing calls to centre inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility.  What inclusive, diverse and accessible online learning looks like is by no means universal. We invite for this section, chapters that demonstrate how the design and experience of critically grounded online learning can create opportunities for learning for a wide range of students, typically “othered”, marginalised, or excluded from online learning spaces.

Provocation 3: Learning activities, processes and materials

Much of the work around process and materials creation in relation to learning design assumes access to resources and skills that are limited in the developing world.  We invite chapters that consider how context shapes choices in relation to learning activities, processes and materials. We hope for chapters that speak to, inter alia,  issues of multilingualism, accessibility, universal design for learning, and racial and cultural representation.

Provocation 4: Assessment and evaluation online 

The question of assessment and the purpose of higher education are unavoidably intertwined. As the shape of higher education and its relationship to society has shifted over time, the nature of assessment has shifted. Concerns about rigour and validity are joined by concerns about authenticity, relevance and transformation. How is online assessment creating opportunities for imagining and challenging the role of assessment? We welcome, for this section, chapters focusing on online assessment practices that offer improvements on well-established practices, or offer wholly innovative takes on the form of assessment in higher education.

Provocation 5: Policy and regulatory environment 

Learning design, materials design and academic expertise all take place within existing institutional, national and international policy, funding and regulatory frameworks. Online learning is still captured by the imaginaries of traditional education. How does the policy and regulatory environment in your context shape the practice of learning design? Is open education enabled or constrained by the policy environment?

Submission Procedure and Due dates

For queries, please contact: tasneem.jaffer@uct.ac.za, shanali.govender@uct.ac.za or laura.czerniewicz@uct.ac.za

Dissemination and Publication

The book will be published under a creative commons licence, encouraging its dissemination and reuse in teaching and learning spaces. We are currently in the process of selecting an open textbook ebook platform.  Key criteria for the platform include that it will offer multimodal digital formats, options to download copies, and options to order print copies at cost.

Editors