Welcome to the Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase!

On this site, we provide articles and resources on concepts related to the multiple fields of learning design: learning engineering, instructional design, educational technology, and learning sciences. Our goal is providing information toward design of effective and engaging learning experiences in all industries and contexts. This knowledgebase provides articles on terms and concepts commonly used in the field, as well as step-by-step procedures on tasks that learning designers and their teams do in their day-to-day work to help people learn.

What is a knowledgebase? A knowledgebase is a handbook and glossary for folks who work in a given field. A knowledgebase provides quick information when someone needs it. Companies and organizations often create knowledgebases from wikis or websites to provide information on important concepts, ideas, and tasks that people need to know to do their work.

Throughout the site, click on any link that you see in the text - it will take you to a related article in the Knowledgebase with more information!

The Design Process: How We Build and Evaluate Educational Products

Experiences and Products: The Things Learning Designers Make

The main job of a learning designer is to make products and experiences with which people can learn. Anytime someone learns as a result of participating in an activity or doing some kind of course, that is an experience that they participated in. In this field, we recognize that any learning activity was intentionally designed by someone to help them learn - that it has goals for how people will learn from it. Learners often use multiple types of products to help them learn during their educational experiences. Educational products are anything used to help people learn. Educational products can be things that people read, videos and multimedia that help people learn, or even a full course, training session, or class on a topic of interest.

What is a learning experience? A learning experience is any time when someone participates in an activity that is intentionally designed to help them learn. The experience is personal to the learner: they perceive many things, interpret information, and choose to engage in the intended activities. An educational designer then is concerned with crafting an experience for the person that is meaningful and engaging as a person participates in the tasks and uses the tools provided in the experience.

In short, designers specify what people should do to have a valuable experience, and how those actions will lead to learning outcomes.

There are four general elements that are specified in the design of a learning experience:

The intended goals of the experience (e.g., learning outcomes, feelings)
The scope and setting of the experience (e.g., duration, location, contexts)
The intended interactions, activities, and tasks to do (e.g., what people are expected to do, and with whom or what)
The educational products that they will use to do actions (e.g., documents, media, technology)

What is an educational product? On this knowledgebase, we define an educational product as any object, procedure, or tool that is created to help someone do actions to help them learn. When we say product, that often implies something that you buy or sell, which is not the case when it comes to learning design. Instead, an educational product is the end result of your process of design - you made something that helps someone learn. Some kind of object, procedure, or tool will be used by the learner as they participate in the experience that you designed.

An educational product can be as simple as something like a single written lesson plan or book. Similarly, an educational product can also be as simple as an activity for a classroom or a collection of videos or podcasts. Educational products can also be courses that someone takes at school, in the workplace, or just for fun. However, educational products can also be highly complex with many components, like an educational app, software, or game, or even whole academic degree programs or professional licensure programs. Regardless of its scope or how big or small it is, a product is just an object or procedure that is used by someone else to learn.

Educational products are almost always used to some degree in learning experiences to support learners' participation and activity. Some learning experiences are neatly "packaged" into a learning product to help direct and guide participants in activity. For example, a video game for learning is foremost a learning experience, as it is designed to guide someone's activity. However, games are also carefully designed educational products that support learners' actions that they perform. In other words, the game is also something that someone uses to support their actions within the game, and is thus also an educational product.

Learning designers follow a plan to generate their ideas for the educational product, then actually making the product, and then using the product that they built. Learning engineers need to follow these steps because educational products tend to work better if they are thoughtfully aligned to the learning goals that they intend to achieve, consider the audiences that are intended to use the product, and determine the evaluation approaches that are used to provide insights on how to continually improve the product.

The Processes of Learning Design - How to Actually Do Educational Design Projects

Designers need to start somewhere! How does an idea for educating someone or helping someone learn become a fully developed educational product or experience? What does a designer need to consider to be able to make something that will help people learn?

There are multiple steps that are involved in well-planned learning design projects, including consideration of the educational technology and media for learning that will communicate information to learners. Additionally, any educational design project requires the designers to consider their ideas from multiple angles to ensure that the product will be successful in helping the intended audience to learn as a result of their participation.

On this website, we suggest using the popular ADDIE Model of design to guide learning design work. We recognize that the ADDIE Model is just one of many approaches that lays out the specific steps toward planning a design project, with each approach having its strengths and shortcomings. That said, the ADDIE Model is one of the strongest and popular approaches that is widely used in the design field across industries, and therefore an excellent choice for newcomers to learning engineering and instructional design.

A common place to start a design project with the ADDIE Model is at the beginning (i.e., the Analysis phase). However, you can also start at the Design phase if you have an idea of the activities or technologies that you may want to have in the experience that you are designing. However, when you skip to the design phase, make sure that you return to the analysis phase shortly after to thoughtfully define the project's scope.

At each step of the ADDIE Model, there are procedures and research-based practices that instructional designers typically follow in the design process. These steps are not there to bog you down in process, red tape, and barriers to innovation. Instead, these steps help designers think through some of the common issues that always seem to arise and sometimes plague a design project. Design approaches like ADDIE have come about over the years after many lessons were learned in the field about what works and what doesn't work in design, and what designers should be mindful of when they build products. Otherwise, they may find themselves having to go back to the drawing board only too late in the process or having to abandon a project due to lack of resources or interest.

There are five steps in the ADDIE approach:

Analysis steps and procedures (i.e., determining the context and scope of the thing)
Design steps and procedures (i.e., specifying the activities, technologies, media, look, and feel of the thing)
Development steps and procedures (i.e., actually building the thing)
Implementation steps and procedures (i.e., actually using the thing in real life with participants)
Evaluation steps and procedures (i.e., studying the thing and how well it worked)

The analysis and design phases of the ADDIE model will take you through the steps of planning, conceptualizing, and creating an educational product design that can then be developed and implemented. The development phase is when you actually make and initially test the design, including all of the documentation, technologies, and media. The implementation phase is dedicated to using and testing the design in real-life settings. Finally, the evaluation phase is used to examine how things went during implementation and gain insights on how the design can be improved. After it's all done, it's common repeat the whole ADDIE process over again to create a revised design that better meets the goals of the designers!

As a result, many designers see the ADDIE process of design as a cycle that repeats again after a design is implemented so that design teams can continually seek to improve educational products and experiences by iterating new revisions after the product has been implemented and evaluated.

Design Specifications: The Results of the Design Process

When designing an educational product or experience, designers need to keep records of the design specifications for a product or experience. The design specifications for the product's features, description, and scope should be well defined and documented so that they can be shared with participants or people outside of the design team. Design specifications define and record the things that learning engineers intend to do or the things that they actually create and deploy. While performing the tasks of the design process, the specifications of a design will be defined.

In short, we use a process of design like the ADDIE Model to define the design specifications for how and why the product should work, look, feel, and be used.

Best practices in the field of learning engineering suggest that projects should specify through written design specifications the items that describe the goals, scope, and features of a product that is being designed. Toward this goal, design specifications typically follow a who-what-when-where-why-how structure, or what is commonly called the W6H framework for design specifications or the "6 W's and an H":

Who (the audience considerations of design)
What (the learning objectives)
When and For How Long (the duration and timing of activities)
Where (the location setting of activities)
How and Why (defining the educational activities, media, technology, and interfaces that people participate with, as well as the look, feel, and layout)
With What Effect (evaluation and assessment)

Important Topics in Learning Engineering

In this section, you can access the encyclopedia of key terms and topics that we use within the learning engineering and instructional design fields. Each article describes concepts and ideas, and provides definitions as well examples, descriptions, and links to other related items for doing the work of an educational designer.

Main categories of concepts and topics:

You can also search for a specific topic that you're looking for by using the "Search The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase" box at the top of the page.

Industries and Domains doing Learning Design Work

Learning designer work in any industry, sector, or context that must develop learning experiences for the people that they serve. Although every industry's educational goals are different, the field of learning engineering ranges across disciplines to provide valuable insights and effective products for any learning-based project.

Industries that use Learning Design:

External Resources for Learning Designers

It is the goal of this wiki to be a useful starting point for documenting the types of work that learning engineers do and the concepts and ideas that are important in learning engineering and similar fields. However, there are countless useful resources available on the web to learning engineering and instructional design professionals looking to find new ideas, get inspiration, look at what the research says, and connect with other professionals in these fields.

External Resources for Learning Designers and Instructional Engineers:

Academic research and design journals in learning engineering and related fields (coming soon)
Popular press and news sources (coming soon)
Research and development conferences in learning engineering and educational technology (coming soon)
Educational product databases, repositories, and design report collections (coming soon)