HERDSA Review of Higher Education Vol.

2,
www.herdsa.org.au/publications/journals/
herdsa-review-higher-education-vol-2

Teaching as design
Peter Goodyear*
University of Sydney, Australia

This review paper draws together some ideas emerging from recent research and
development activity in the field of ‘design for learning’. It explores the argument
that teaching in higher education will necessarily shift the balance of its efforts
towards a greater investment in design, as a way of coping with otherwise
intolerable pressures on staff and resources. It frames this argument by
expanding the core conceptions of what teaching work entails and then focuses
on some characteristic qualities of teaching as a design activity. Research relevant
to ‘teaching as design’ intertwines issues that are of practical and theoretical
significance. The scientific study of teachers’ design work can be seen as falling
into three main areas: design epistemology (or the study of ‘designerly ways of
knowing’), design phenomenology (the study of the products of the design
process), and design praxiology (the study of the practices and processes of
design). The paper introduces some examples of work in each of these areas and
identifies areas that need further research. For practical purposes, the paper
discusses ways of building design capacity within universities, through sharpening
the focus on students’ activity, and helping students to take greater control over
the design of their own learning tasks and learning environments.

Keywords: university teaching; learning design; design research.

… the function of teaching is to arrange—to design and

implement—a context in which learning can flourish
(Dinham, 1989, p80)

1. Teaching as design for learning: An overview of the

argument
Broadly speaking, teaching work in higher education is of three kinds. There
is ‘interactive teaching’—when teachers and students are working together

* Email: peter.goodyear@sydney.edu.au
Peter Goodyear

in real time. This is usually preceded by some kind of teacher planning

activity and it is often followed by evaluative and reflective activity (Clark &
Peterson, 1986, Moallem, 1998, Hativa and Goodyear, 2002). The evaluative
and reflective teaching activity has twin foci. The teacher prepares feedback
for students, e.g. through reading, marking and commenting on assignments
the students have submitted. The teacher also reflects on the whole
teaching and learning episode, and notes what they might do better next
time. Ideally, the three phases form a loop, and the teacher’s work thereby
takes on a self-improving dynamic.
This paper explores the argument that teaching in higher education
needs to find ways of investing more heavily in the planning phase and that
teachers’ planning needs to take on more of the qualities of design for
learning. This is both an economic and an educational argument. In the
‘drivers of change’ section, below, I show that teaching traditionally—in the
literal sense of teaching as one was taught oneself—is unable to cope with
the changes now besetting higher education. Shifting resources towards
design for learning, and adopting more effective design practices, is a
credible strategy for improving the quality of higher education while
managing with tighter funding. This applies at all key levels within the
university. I will argue that spending more time on design will allow
individual teachers and teaching teams to cope with intensifying pressures on
the quality of their work, and to create better learning opportunities for
their students. As a corollary, universities that find better ways of supporting
the design work of their teaching staff will be well placed to meet the
changing needs of students.
Design is not a panacea. Designers often get things badly wrong. But
there is a steadily growing awareness within education that the established
design professions have some methods for dealing with very complex issues,
resolving conflicting requirements, reframing problems, and working with
‘end users’ (customers and clients; students) that are useful in educational
practice (Krippendorff, 2006; Goodyear & Retalis, 2010; McKenney &
Reeves, 2012; Kali, McKenney & Sagy, 2015). Moreover, crystallising good
pedagogy into designed artefacts, such as courses, assessment tasks, videos,
online tools and learning spaces, is also a way of turning recurrent
expenditure (of time, effort, and cash) into durable assets.
The key challenge is to make universities more hospitable environments
for design—to build design capacity among all staff (lecturers, professional
staff and managers), and also to help students become more capable, self-
managing participants in the processes that complete and enact designs for
learning.

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The paper draws on recent research that can illuminate the nature of
this challenge and identify some areas in which forward movement may be
most beneficial.

2. Teaching in higher education

Recent dramatic developments in the use of technology in higher education
—notably the MOOCs phenomenon— have been accompanied by
commentary that perpetuates the myth that universities still teach as they
taught in medieval times. The dismissive line from those promoting MOOCs
is strikingly consistent: Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX says “university teaching
hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages” (Hare, 2014).
‘Education hasn't changed for 1,000 years’, says Peter
Levine, a partner with Andreessen Horowitz and a
Udacity board member, summing up the Valley's
conventional wisdom on the topic (Chafkin, 2013/2014)
The way we teach hasn’t really changed in millennia
(Matthews, 2013)
While most lecturers do still lecture, the ways in which students study
have been transformed—at least in the universities of the world’s richer
nations. Only a decade ago, most students in universities in North America,
Europe and Australasia were not routinely bringing laptops to the campus
(Ipsos MORI, 2008). Now, the majority of them carry some kind of tablet
device or laptop around with them at all times. It is commonplace for them
to view recordings of lectures on an iPad, at home or on the bus. It is
common to download original research articles from online libraries. It is
common to self-manage group-based projects, through mixtures of face-to-
face meetings and social networking tools, like Facebook (Donlan, 2014;
Henderson et al., 2015). Most universities now depend on web-based
systems to make available to students all of the key information about their
courses of study, assessment requirements, timetabling of sessions, ways of
contacting teachers, etc. The availability of online resources has transformed
the learning environment for students, expanding access to knowledge,
information, data and people exponentially.
Lecturers still lecture. But there is also a growing awareness that the
lecture has multiple functions—it has never been a simple matter of
transmitting information. It is also a site for students to meet, to update
their sense of how they are faring with the course, by picking up subtle cues
from other students. It is a structuring resource: part of the spatio-temporal
scaffolding that helps them do the work of being a conscientious student. It

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Peter Goodyear

is a place to watch experts think on their feet, improvise multiple

explanations, give clues about what will come up in exams, reveal what they
value, and, on a good day, share a passion.
Moreover, lectures are changing. The growing availability of video-
recorded lectures is encouraging some teachers to experiment with how to
make best use of the precious time when they and their students come face-
to-face. Lectures become ‘flipped’ (for example see Herreid & Schiller, 2013)
and learning experiences becomes ‘blended’ (Garrison & Vaughan 2008;
Bliuc et al., 2007).
Given these changes in the use of lectures, and the larger
transformations underway in the scale and richness of students’ learning
environments, it makes sense to adopt an expansive conception of teaching
work—one which is not restricted to the emblematic activity of lecturing.
Teaching can be understood as any activity which is undertaken with the
intention of helping somebody learn. Teaching is not restricted to giving
instruction. It also involves creating situations that are conducive to learning.
In this sense, there is not an essential difference, only a difference in scale
and complexity, between (a) a lecturer arranging chairs into a circle at the
start of a seminar and (b) a multidisciplinary team of people creating a new
learning hub, setting up a new learning management system, or revamping a
degree program.
Teaching includes, but is not limited to, acts of explaining, instructing,
advising and encouragement. It includes testing, marking and giving feedback.
Therefore, it also includes deciding what to assess and how to assess it. It
includes recommending things to read, and how to read them. More
recently, it has come to include recommending additional kinds of
resources, such as websites, recordings of lectures, online video clips and
databases. In some disciplines or professional fields, teaching also involves
organising lab classes, field trips, internships and other kinds of work
placements. On occasion, it may also include suggesting to students that
they should tackle a task in groups, or find a peer to give feedback on a draft
assignment, or think of themselves as apprentice members of a professional
community. Teaching work can also include a distinctly material dimension.
For example, when teaching a lab class, a chemistry lecturer will need to be
sure that adequate supplies of the right chemicals and apparatus are
available. This materialist dimension of teaching can manifest itself in a
variety of ways. Some teachers take great care about the placement of
chairs in a seminar room, to encourage equitable participation in discussions.
Lecture rooms need to be big enough to seat all students, but they also
need good acoustics, or a public address system, or the lecturer needs to

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change their mode of delivery and project their voice. The text on
PowerPoint slides needs to be big enough to read—a function of the depth
of the room and the throw of the projector, resolved in the lecturer’s
choice of an appropriate font size.
Clearly, teaching involves much more than exposition. Like learning, it is
an activity in which the social and the material— not just the epistemic—are
consequential. Some careful forethought, imagination, empathy and planning
will often tilt the balance towards success. As many experienced teachers
will know, when it comes to planning educational activities, the devil is often
in the details: small oversights can have disproportionate effects on how a
learning activity unfolds. Lack of attention to detail in the planning can
sometimes be remedied by quick thinking and improvisation in interactive
teaching, but getting the devil out of the detail soon becomes a
preoccupation for the teacher who wants to minimise risk and anxiety.
None of this teaching work necessarily evokes the idea of design—of
seeing a significant part of the teacher’s work as design-like. Indeed the term
‘design’ does not have much currency in the core practices of higher
education, outside the disciplines which teach design and in the work of
instructional/educational designers (Keppell, 2007; Ellis & Goodyear, 2010,
Chapter 8; Luckin, 2010; Laurillard, 2012; Conole, 2013; Gibbons, 2013).
The word ‘design’ does sometimes crop up in conjunction with courses,
curricula and assessment, but the practices to which it refers, in these cases,
do not often have the defining qualities that design researchers normally
associate with design (Cross, 2006; Krippendorff, 2006; Farrell & Hooker,
2013). For example, the framing of problems is not routinely questioned,
and analysis all too often proceeds hastily to implementation (Fraser &
Bosanquet 2006; Hoogveld et al., 2002; O’Neill, 2010; Stark, 2002). This
rush to implementation has at least two drivers. A teacher who doesn’t have
a sense of design as a process, and who doesn’t have the conceptual tools
and skills to work through a design problem in a creative but structured
way, will be likely to jump straight to a solution. Also, being submerged in
the taken-for-granted assumptions of both a disciplinary tradition and a
teaching tradition can make solutions look deceptively self-evident.

3. Teaching as design
This expansive conception of teaching conjures up an image of teaching
work as multidimensional. As already noted, there is a temporal dimension,
in which there are:

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interactive forms of teaching that involve real-time exposition and

other kinds of direct instruction, as well as facilitation of students’
learning activities
pre-active forms of teaching: planning, design etc.
post-active forms of teaching: reflection, evaluation, assessment.
Teaching as design is therefore part of pre-active teaching, and can be
seen as a subset or type of planning—as planning that uses a distinctive
mode of thought and set of tools and methods. However, design is probably
most powerful when conceived as the intelligent centre of the whole
teaching-learning lifecycle. For example, design can, and probably should,
include (re-)designing evaluation instruments that are specifically tuned to
picking up exactly the right kind of data to feed the next round of design
decisions (Goodyear & Dimitriadis, 2013; Dimitriadis & Goodyear, 2013).
In relation to teaching as design, there are three main classes of things
which can be designed: (i) good learning tasks, (ii) properly supportive
physical and digital environments, and (iii) forms of social organisation and
divisions of labour.
And each of these classes of designable things, or ‘design components’,
needs to be thought of, designed and managed, at multiple scale levels, by
different people who contribute from different roles and positions within
the organisation. Hence, design of a reading list sits within the design of a
library collection; design of an assessment task sits within the design of a
course, which sits within the design of a degree program and a set of
university-wide generic graduate attributes. Design for groupwork sits
within designed social structures, such as courses and cohorts.
Two final points should be made about this design activity: (i) it works
indirectly—students adapt, interpret and customise, (ii) it rarely involves the
creation of brand new things—more often, it involves selections of existing
things and their configuration into new assemblages. (Which is also true of
design in other fields.)
Figure 1 (adapted from Goodyear & Ellis, 2008) helps pin down the
essence of this view of teaching as design. It portrays design as having an
indirect effect on student learning activity, working through the specification
of worthwhile tasks (epistemic structures), the recommendation of
appropriate tools, artefacts and other physical resources (structures of
place), and recommendation of divisions of labour etc. (social structures).

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Figure 1: Activity-centered design model

This is an activity-based, or activity-centric, view of learning. It prioritises

what the students do: including what they think, feel and say. As John Biggs
(1999a) reminds us, what students do is consequential for their learning.
John Biggs has remained properly insistent about this focus on ‘what the
student does’ which is also the subtitle of his highly influential Teaching for
Quality Learning book (Biggs, 1999b; Biggs & Tang, 2007). Biggs acknowledges
Tom Shuell as the inspiration for this phrase.
“… what the student does is actually more important in
determining what is learned than what the teacher does”
(Shuell, 1986, p429).
Everything else is merely a stimulus or scaffold for their activity. Most of
the work students do—much of their learning activity—takes place without
direct supervision from their teachers. Hence, teachers need to design good
learning tasks and to communicate task specifications clearly to their
students. Because design works indirectly—students normally interpret task
specifications, rather than following them blindly—designed tasks need to be
understood as resources for activity, not determinants of it. And because
activity is both physically and socially situated, teachers are under an
obligation to help students locate, access and configure the physical
resources they need for the activity in which they are engaging and to help
them find good ways of working with their peers (e.g. in pairs, T-groups or
communities of practice).
This conception of teaching as design touches some deep themes in the
organisation of collective human life. Teaching is a moral activity that

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intentionally shapes what other people do, in order to help them learn—
which, in turn, shapes their future actions, capabilities, dispositions, ways of
comprehending themselves and the world, and so on.
To appreciate the full import of this point, it helps to reflect for a
moment on structure and agency. What people do is often best understood
as an interplay between structure and agency (Giddens, 1984; Archer, 2000,
2007). People’s action can be thought of as a self-directed journeying
through a pre-existing landscape. Sometimes the landscape is flat and affords
walking in any direction one chooses. Sometimes, the tilt of the land keeps
surreptitiously edging one’s feet downhill. Sometimes one can only walk
where safe paths have been trodden by others. The landscapes within which
activity unfolds are constituted by economic, social and political forces, as
well as material realities. Or rather, the landscape is itself formed through
the actions of people and things, over longer and shorter spans of time
(Ingold, 2000, 2011).
On this view, one of the ways that teaching can take place is through
shaping the landscape across which students walk. It involves the setting in
place of epistemic, material and social structures that guide, but do not
determine, what students do. There is a beguiling recursiveness to this
conception. The aim is not just to shape landscapes (learning environments,
if you prefer) that help students become more capable agents—it is not just
about increasing their personal agency. While this is important, it is also
important to help students read the landscape and learn to (re)shape
landscapes for their own future activity, and for the activities of others,
including for future learning.
This is an old form of teaching. For example, creating environments in
which the young can learn by observing their elders performing important
activities—making places that are congenial for learning mimetically—has
played a very powerful role in human cultural evolution. Kim Sterelny (2003,
2012) provides a very readable account of this process in early human
history. Stephen Billett (2014) analyses the history of mimetic learning,
especially in relation to learning for trades and other occupations.

4. The essence of design

There is a sizeable body of research on teachers’ planning, including planning
by university teachers (Eley 2006; McAlpine et al, 2006; Stark, 2002).
However, planning and design are not the same thing. Design entails
planning, but (a) it involves more than planning and (b) it introduces some
distinctive kinds of problems and ways of handling them. Much of the rest of

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this paper reviews aspects of research on design (for learning). As a

preamble, it will be helpful to pin down some distinctive characteristics of
design.
Design typically results in the creation of specifications of some kind,
rather than directly in a finished product. It produces blueprints, plans,
sketches: inscriptions of various types, that guide the creation of an imagined
end product. Etymologically, ‘design’ relates to both ‘making marks’
(drawing) and ‘marking out’ (designating; giving significance to)
(Krippendorff, 2006).
Many design practices, including the emblematic areas like architecture,
are oriented to the (eventual) creation of material products: simple or
complex. In recent years, service design has become more widely practiced
(e.g. in the design of public services) (Boland & Collopy 2004; Meroni &
Sangiorgi, 2011). Design for learning is a hybrid, involving mixtures of
service, product and space design. This hybridity is accompanied by a need
for a more complex knowledge-base for design than is sometimes found in
discussions of knowledge for university teaching (see Design Epistemology
section, below).
Design normally involves rapid generation of large numbers of possible
solutions—not just rapid prototyping but design experiments of various
kinds. Allan Collins and Ann Brown can be credited with the idea of bringing
design experiments into the repertoire of educational researchers (Collins,
1990; Brown, 1992). As such, they are often cited as inspiring the design-
based research (DBR) movement. There has been some slippage in the
translation process, however. The range of activities that product designers
and architects call ‘design experiments’ is larger and serves a wider set of
purposes than we find these days in DBR. In these more established design
professions, design experiments can be cheap and small-scale. A very
important function of this mode of working is to test and expand the
understanding of the problem. Reframing the problem, for example by seeing
the problem as a symptom of some larger problem, is a classic design move.
Design usually entails resolving tensions between competing objectives. It
is intrinsically complex because of this. (In contrast, classic introductions to
instructional design assume that it is primarily a matter of optimising
instruction for a single, simple goal). In higher education, for example, we
often work with multiple intended learning outcomes for any one learning
activity, and these outcomes are often in competition, if only for the
student’s time and attention. For example, a learning activity may
simultaneously involve coming to understand a Physics principle, learning to
work with others and becoming better at managing one’s own learning.

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Optimising for just one of these can imperil the others. Because of the
complexity involved in balancing competing objectives, and the inherent
difficult of determining optimal solutions, design is characterised as a space
of ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel & Webber, 1984; Farrell & Hooker, 2013).
Design sometimes leads to the creation of a fixed product, offered to
consumers in a ‘take it or leave it’ spirit. More often, the designer’s work is
seen as being taken over by others on a path or lifecycle. In recent times,
this process of consumers or end-users taking over, reconfiguring, adapting,
personalising and embellishing designed products has been given wider
recognition in the design community—there is now a stronger sense of co-
production or co-configuration, with a concomitant sense of design as being
fundamentally a communicative process (Krippendorff 2006). This is
discussed further below in reference to the semantic turn in design and the
involvement of students in co-configuring their own learning environments.

5. Drivers of change: Challenges for traditional teaching

It is one thing to advocate for a more ‘designerly’ approach to university
teaching; quite another to explain why it is likely to become more salient in
our future work. Figure 2 is an attempt to portray forces that are
challenging the capacity of universities to continue to teach in traditional
ways, by which I mean through teaching practices that are copied from one
generation to the next.
Figure 2 highlights four sets of forces that are having a powerful effect on
contemporary higher education. (1) In the shift from elite to mass higher
education, students’ needs and expectations are diversifying and the
educational and logistical demands being made of universities are becoming
harder to meet. (2) Employers and their representatives are continuing to
criticise universities for failing to produce work-ready graduates. Students
themselves are questioning whether they are getting a fair return on the
time and fees they are investing. (3) The technologies being used in
knowledge work—for research and teaching and in other areas of
intellectual life—are changing rapidly. New knowledge practices are
emerging, such as those involving data analytics, visualisation and very
complex forms of computational modelling. The pace of technological
innovation is accelerating. This creates risk and uncertainty for university
managers, especially with respect to campus planning, IT and educational
strategies in the longer term. (4) Dwindling public funding of teaching, as
well as competing demands on time—for research, service, entrepreneurial
activities, etc.—are intensifying the pressures on teaching staff.

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Traditional teaching practices under increasing stress

Diversifying student Rising expectations

needs and about graduate
expectations capabilities
Teaching
as Design
Intensification of Accelerating
pressures on technological
teaching staff change

Accumulating research evidence about successful learning and teaching

Figure 2: Drivers of change: ‘teaching as design’ as a means of resolving conflicting

forces shaping contemporary higher education

These four sets of forces combine to place traditional teaching practices

under stress. That is to say, teaching approaches that may have been the
norm 20 or even 10 years ago no longer look affordable or appealing. The
reproduction of past teaching practices—passing on disciplinary traditions
intact—is unsustainable in a rapidly shifting environment: it is no way to deal
with change. Coupled with this, there is an accumulating body of research-
based evidence about successful learning and teaching that at least questions,
and sometimes condemns, the apparent good sense of some past practices.
Placing ‘teaching as design’ at the centre of Figure 2 is a way of asserting
that evidence-informed, creative, design-based strategies will be needed if
universities are to generate innovative repertoires of educational
approaches to deal with, and ideally to anticipate, changes in their operating
environments. This assertion means much more than employing greater
numbers of better-trained educational designers, useful though this should
be. It means making universities more design-savvy; helping everyone in the
institution participate in knowledgeable, design-led change.
For universities to become more congenial homes for design, managers
and other staff need a sharper, shared understanding of what is special about

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design. Consequently, the next three sections of this paper look more
closely at research relevant to building design capability within universities.
They are structured using Nigel Cross’s (2006) partitioning of the science of
design: design epistemology (the study of ‘designerly ways of knowing’), design
phenomenology (the study of the form and configuration of designed
artefacts), and design praxiology (the study of the practices and processes of
design).

6. Design epistemology: actionable knowledge for design

The knowledge needed to design, in education as in other fields, is actionable
knowledge: that is, knowledge that is sufficient to inform action in the world.
Unlike (educational) researchers, who can remain perpetually equivocal
about the status and sufficiency of what is known through research, teachers
and designers must make decisions, usually on the basis of fragmentary,
heterogeneous and uncertain knowledge. Their work practices are framed
by unmissable deadlines—courses, materials, assessment tasks, rooms etc.
have to be ready by a fixed date. They have a moral obligation to act, in the
best interests of their students. Ellsworth puts this well, contrasting the
situations of a scientific researcher and a judge in court,
Science demands no final decision; it is an ongoing
process. If the evidence is murky, scientists can wait, can
reserve judgement until they can conduct further
research. And they can figure out what further research
needs to be done to answer the question, and do it.
Judges can neither reserve judgement nor go beyond the
data presented in court, however ambiguous those data
might be. They cannot carry out further research, nor
wait until others have done so; they must decide.
(Ellsworth, 2005, p696).
This brute fact, that designers are caught up in the world of action and
have an imperative to act, within a certain timeframe and on the basis of
imperfect knowledge, has implications for their use of knowledge and for
the kinds of knowledge that are most use to them. Crucially, a designer
needs to understand the extent of their freedom to act: what can be
changed and what is unchangeable? A common design tactic is to reframe
the problem as presented, to see whether a more radical approach to a
design solution might actually be better. It is sometimes argued that design
in educational settings is more strongly constrained by existing practices,
limited resources and risk-averse regulatory systems than is design in some
other fields. It is also likely that a design anthropologist from Mars would

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not be able to infer the intended functions of what they find to have been
set in place in our universities. So the designerly aspects of university
teaching work are seriously and strangely constrained.
What this means for knowledge for teachers as designers is a complex
story, of which the chief points are as follows:
Research-based knowledge of the kind that emanates from the critical
traditions is useful as a way of sensitising the teacher-designer to the forces
shaping the landscape within which their work is set, and can be a valuable
part of their moral education. That said, research from a critical tradition
does not connect smoothly with the needs of a teacher-designer who is
trying to make the best of things in compromised circumstances.
Design involves making invitations to other people to act in certain kinds
of ways. These invitations can be clear and explicit, but they are sometimes
encoded into the affordances of materials. Designers’ knowledge has to
include ways of predicting, or at least imagining, how other people will
respond to these invitations. Areas of the human sciences which produce
such second-order knowledge are particularly valuable. These include, but
are not limited to, various branches of psychology, anthropology,
ergonomics and economics.
The design of scaffolding is a crucial aspect of design for learning. Thinking
about the schema in Figure 1, students’ activity is only in part a response to
a written or spoken task. What they do, moment-by-moment, is also
influenced by features of their task environment and a key success factor can
often be found in the interplay between (a) a clearly expressed task and (b)
subtle scaffolding that allows the students to focus their scarce cognitive
resources on the core of the learning task, rather than on worrying about
what they will have to do next. This can be hard to judge, at design time, but
it is vitally important when one is aiming to promote active learning among
large student groups with inadequate staffing—such as when there are not
enough facilitators to repair poor designs interactively at ‘learntime’. Two
kinds of knowledge are needed for the design of good scaffolding: (i) a
psychologically-informed understanding of why scaffolding strategies are
needed and how they work, and (ii) discipline-informed experiential
knowledge of what scaffolding will be most appropriate when. This is a
subset of pedagogical content knowledge—see, for example, van Driel &
Berry, 2011.
Being able to anticipate how learning places, tools and other artefacts
will fit together and interact depends upon forms of knowledge and ways of
knowing that are characteristic of the physical sciences (≈positivist). Being
able to anticipate how students will respond to learning tasks and learning

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environments depends upon forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that

are characteristic of the human sciences (≈interpretivist). Consequently,
designing (for) complex assemblages of humans and things requires an
epistemic fluency that is rare, indeed sometimes frowned upon, in
educational practice (Goodyear & Zenios, 2007; Goodyear & Ellis, 2007;
Goodyear & Markauskaite, 2009; Markauskaite & Goodyear, forthcoming).
… architecture has sometimes found ways of getting on
with the job when education freezes in the headlights of
epistemological or moral uncertainty. Educationalists talk
about the dangers of combining contradictory
epistemological positions … while architects combine
ideas from mechanics, optics, acoustics, economics,
aesthetics, human biology, social psychology and history.
They can combine mathematics and astrology without
blushing. They build terrible buildings and some great
ones. They sometimes ignore crucial human needs and
wants, but the best of them do tend to show an
understanding of human nature and its relationship to the
material world that is subtle and profound. (Goodyear,
2011)
Finally, there is a kind of meta-knowledge about design that is important
for situating design in the evolving circumstances of higher education. To
make the point briefly, one can think of two contrasting conceptions of
design, which I will label ‘the organic’ and ‘the strategic’. By organic design, I
mean processes that are endogenous to an evolving system, whereby change
occurs through multiple local enhancements that are typically the work of
the inhabitants of the system. This might also be labelled ‘bottom up’ design.
It is well-described from both a theoretical and practical perspective by
Christopher Alexander and Tim Ingold. Christopher Alexander has written
on this topic, in various ways, since the mid-60s. Books that can be strongly
recommended to those interested in design for learning include his works
aimed at democratizing architecture and urban planning (notably Alexander,
1979; Alexander et al., 1977, 1987), as well as his works that deal directly
with campus planning and university architecture (Alexander et al., 1975,
2012). His foundational work on order in natural and built form is best
approached in Alexander (1964) and Alexander (2006). Alexander’s work
on design patterns and pattern languages has been used and misused in areas
as diverse as human computer interaction, community development,
software engineering, school architecture and educational technology
(Goodyear & Retalis, 2010; Nair et al, 2009). The anthropologist Tim

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Ingold’s thinking about design as a locally unfolding process is best

summarised in Gatt & Ingold (2013).
While there are good reasons to value well-informed, inquisitive local
design, not all problems are amenable to local, organic solution—especially
when systems become grossly distorted by external pressures such that
internal capacities for generating workable responses are compromised. In
such cases, a more strategic intervention may be needed. The key point
here is that knowledge for design needs to help distinguish between
situations where organic design is working well and situations where more
strategic design is necessary. The movement known as ‘design based
research’ (DBR) combines elements of both the organic and strategic.
Typically, design based research imports researchers’ ideas into a specific
educational setting and researchers then work in partnership with teachers
(the local inhabitants) to develop, test and refine successive iterations of an
intervention (Cobb et al., 2003; Reimann, 2011; McKenney & Reeves, 2012).
That said, the DBR literature is surprisingly quiet about design itself.

7. Design phenomenology: what gets designed

Design phenomenology is the subfield of the scientific study of design that
focuses on the nature of the products of the design process. This goes
beyond the form and configuration of designed artefacts (Cross’s original
definition). Indeed, one of the goals of design phenomenology, when higher
education is the application area, is to identify the scope of what can and
should be designed.
First and foremost, learning cannot be designed. Neither can activity or
experience be designed. They can be designed for (Wenger, 1998).
Second, as suggested earlier, an activity-centered approach to teaching
and design that acknowledges the physically and socially situated nature of
students’ learning activity will focus on three main design components that
come together at ‘learntime’ (Figure 1). While they entangle in students’
actual learning activity, they are best kept conceptually distinct in parts of
the design process. This acts as both a reminder—to attend to all three of
the components: epistemic, physical and social—and as a way of maintaining
flexibility to shift elements of a design solution from one component to
another. For example, if the specification of a task (epistemic) begins to look
over-complicated, it may be possible to offload parts of it to scaffolding
which is provided through supportive digital tools or artefacts. Or if the
teacher-designer begins to worry that a piece of groupwork may go awry,
then they can supplement the social design (e.g. forming project teams of

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four people) with some additional instructions about how to co-ordinate

work (i.e. they can elaborate the task specification). In analysing what then
takes place in the learning activity, part of the intellectual challenge is
untangling the interacting elements in order to map them back into the
(re)design process for the next cycle of the course.
Third, what gets configured into a design varies in scale and complexity:
from a brief in-class task to a whole degree program; from a lab book to a
library; from a dyad to a cohort.
Fourth, what is designed is acknowledged by the designer to be open to
transformation by the students who are the ‘users’ of what has been
designed. In some situations, such as those where serious risks for others
may eventuate if student activity strays from what is intended, it may be
important to ‘lock down’ the design, minimising scope for accidental
variation. But in many higher education situations, we want students to
appropriate what is designed. Klaus Krippendorff (2006) talks about the
‘semantic turn’ in design, arguing that conceptions of design must shift from
thinking about the surface appearance of fixed material objects to the
creation of artefacts (social, material or conceptual/epistemic) that have a
chance of meaning something to their users. Successful designs are those
which come to fruition through the help of many people; learning
environments are co-configured and learning activities and outcomes co-
produced.
This is part of what allows students to make a task personally meaningful,
and/or improve its alignment to their personal needs and interests. It is also
an important enabler of students’ increasing ability to manage their own
learning, encouraging them to sharpen the definition of learning tasks, enrich
their social and professional networks and configure their learning
environment to better suit their needs. One can think of this as a socio-
material expansion of the idea of metacognition or self-regulation.

8. Design praxiology: Studying what designers do

There is a small but growing body of empirical research into what people do
when they are designing for other people’s learning. Ertmer, Parisio and
Wardak (2013) provide a good, recent overview. Much of this research
focuses on professional educational/instructional designers. But there is also
a thin strand of inquiry focused on the design activities of university
teachers, sometimes comparing their design strategies and design thinking
with the strategies and thinking of experienced, professionally-trained
educational designers (Moallem, 1998; Hoogveld et al 2002; Kirschner et al

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2002; Ertmer et al. 2008, 2009; Bennett et al., 2009, 2015; Goodyear &
Markauskaite 2009; Kali et al 2011, 2015). Supplementing this are the
insights that come as a by-product of evaluation studies carried out to test
novel design tools and methods (Masterman et al 2009; Conole 2013; Prieto
et al., 2013).
Within this pool of empirical material, there is actually very little work
that provides a close look at how higher education teachers engage in design
processes, particularly when they are doing so in their habitual ways, rather
than for the purposes of an experiment. Our current best insights come
from:
interview-based studies that ask teachers about their design
activities, though these studies are subject to all the usual restrictions
of first-person accounts of activity. Recent outcomes here align with
earlier research on ways that teachers think when they are more
generally involved in course or curriculum planning: thoughts are
focussed by teachers’ beliefs about their students, what their
students will and won’t enjoy, and by pragmatic constraints of the
teaching and learning environment See for example Ellis et al (2009),
Bennett et al (2015).
experimental studies in simulated design studio environments, which
allow close observation and debriefing interviews with teacher-
designers, but which are weak on ecological validity. Recent
outcomes here have provided some useful warnings against imposing
design methods or tools that lead to premature formalisation of
designs. See for example Thompson et al (2013).
some rare naturalistic observational studies that focus on discourse
in design meetings. Insights here relate mainly to the development of
shared epistemic agency in multidisciplinary design teams, tracing the
ways in which teams move towards design solutions by incorporating
each other’s design insights (Kali et al 2011).
This area—studying university teachers’ existing design practices and
identifying ways of enhancing those practices—is wide open for further
investigation. So too is research into the ways in which other university staff
who support student learning engage in design activities.

9. Capturing, sharing and reusing design ideas

Teachers in higher education have been notoriously reluctant to use other
teachers’ educational products, though there are some signs that ease of

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access to burgeoning online resources is helping shift this cautious position.

It may be that the time-cost of reviewing resources created by other
teachers was a significant barrier, prior to the growth of easily searchable
online collections of fine-grained teaching materials. It may also be that this
is another area where the pressure of students’ changing practices and
expectations has made more conservative positions untenable. Laurillard
(1993, 2012) and Conole (2013) provide a sense of the history here.
Against this background, R&D aimed at making it easier for teachers to
capture, share and re-use design ideas, rather than finished resources, has
had rather limited success. People have been working on this area for more
than 40 years (Pirolli, 1991; Goodyear, 1997; Conole, 2013; Maina et al.,
2015). It may turn out that the growth in reuse of learning resources that
we are currently witnessing will spill over into the area of reusable designs,
especially if the recent shift in attention to the actual needs and working
practices of teacher-designers bears fruit. Among the more promising areas
are (i) (runnable) computer-based designs for learning activities, such as one
finds with the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) (Dalziel, 2007),
and (ii) pedagogical design patterns and pattern languages (Laurillard, 2012;
Goodyear & Retalis, 2010; Mor at al., 2014).

10. Conceptions of learning and design

Much of the writing about design for learning in higher education implicitly
or explicitly adopts what Anna Sfard (1998) labelled the ‘acquisition’
metaphor for learning. That is, learning is seen as something which results in
the personal acquisition of knowledge and skills. Rather less attention has
been paid to other conceptions of learning, such as ‘learning as participation’
or ‘learning as knowledge creation’ (Paavola et al., 2004; Moen et al., 2012).
This is very significant for conceptions of ‘teaching as design’ because the
relations between (a) what can be designed (what is set in place) and (b)
students’ situated activity, differ substantially for each of these conceptions
of learning. For example, if learning is seen as a matter of acquiring
knowledge, then tools which are set in place for students are there to help
them acquire that knowledge: they are solely a means to that end. But if
learning is seen as primarily a matter of participating in a social practice,
tools are there to be mastered, as instruments of that social practice. If
learning is seen as a matter of collaborating in knowledge creation, then new
tools are designed and created by students, as a legitimate outcome of their
work.

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All three metaphors are valuable. So teachers need an expansive,

nuanced conception of students’ engagement in design (Allert et al., 2014).
Part of graduating as a lifelong learner is knowing how to design for one’s
own learning, and for the learning of one’s workmates: learning how to
create better environments in which to think for a living.

11. Acknowledgements
I would love to be able to lay claim to the phrase ‘teaching as design’ but
Google makes us all more honest and humble scholars. I believe the term
was first used by Sarah Dinham in 1989. See also Wallace & Mishra (2002),
Brown & Edelson (2003), Recker et al. (2007). I first employed it in 2007, in
the context of my ALTC Fellowship.
The research reported here has been part-funded by the Australian
Research Council through Laureate Fellowship grant FL100100203 (Learning,
technology and design: architectures for productive networked learning). My
earlier work on teaching as design was part-funded by the Australian
Learning and Teaching Council (later, the Office for Learning and Teaching).
I also gratefully acknowledge the opportunities ALTC funding gave me to
work with the Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows. My thanks to Peter
Kandlbinder for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge my colleagues in the CoCo team at
Sydney, and our academic visitors, for many lessons learned about design.

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