What is Learning Experience Design?

* soft, subtle music plays *

How do you currently design lessons or training programs?

Take a moment and think about your own process.
Or better yet, grab a pen and paper, and sketch it right now.
Yes, right now! We’ll give you some time.

Done?

Okay. Now compare your process with what other educators have come up with. What do you notice?

When we ask this question to other educators, or reflect on our own practices, we’ve noticed it’s pretty common to start with outcomes, and then proceed to arranging topics, activities, and assessments.

Then we make a lesson plan or training design, which often looks like a table of activities matched to topics and content. Finally we implement by following the plan, assuming that all learners will interact with it the same way.

As we know, this is a traditional approach that we’ve inherited from years of teaching, and there is a tendency to become too focused on the content that we forget an essential part of our process — our learners

What if we made space for our learners’ different contexts, and planned classes, workshops, and modules with our learners in mind?

This is Learning Experience Design.

Learning experience design is a process that weaves together outcomes, tools, contexts, and activities into a purposeful human experience that makes learning happen.

Key to the process is empathy—placing ourselves in the shoes of our learners and other stakeholders in order to design meaningful and accessible learning experiences.

It is guided by multiple disciplines: education, human-centered design or design thinking, psychology, social sciences, and technology.

Learning experience design makes us think about these questions:

What is our learning goal?

Who are our learners and what is the experience like, from their perspectives?

What can I design and build?

When the pandemic happened, the shift to remote learning really highlighted the fact that our learners are very different. They have different needs, different environments, different strengths and barriers to learning.

Knowing this, we empathize with our learners, using what we know about them, and what we know about good teaching and learning practices to select our strategies. Then we prototype the learning experience, getting feedback and improving on it.

These are things that we might already be doing on some level, but being a Learning Experience Designer means doing these more intentionally to design more humane, more accessible learning experiences.

In Habi, we’ve used LX Design to design workshops, modules, games, apps, posters, infographics, speeches, worksheets, unconferences, webinars, even research papers!

Everything that has a learning goal can be a learning experience that we design. As educators and learning experience designers, our goal should not just be to teach subjects. Our goal is to teach people.

We want them to succeed outside of the classroom – to be active participants of both local and global communities, working together to build more peaceful, inclusive, and secure societies.

So through this course, we invite you to start integrating learning experience design into your process, and become more learner-centered in your approach.

As we end this video, try to reflect on this question – what are the ways that you are already thinking and acting like a learning experience designer?

We’re looking forward to hear your stories!