Moodle Activities and Resources Mapped to the Six Learning types

In a previous article the six learning types required for effective learning design was discussed (from Laurillard's Teaching as a design science: 2012). See this video here. In that article, it was suggested that Moodle (and other VLPs) should make learning activities and resources available that can be directly mapped to each of the learning type, so that when technology is used for training, an effective learning design can be put in place.

Since writing that post, COVID-19 hit us; everybody went in lock-down. All trainers scrambled to go on-line. Our college (CTC) included. We decided to use the ideas behind Laurillard's Conversational Framework and the UCL's Learning Designer tool in a Moodle Crash Course to teach some of our our trainers to convert some of their training to an on-line format. (Guest Access is available at this site, but if you let me have your e-mail address, I can register a limited number of people as students on the course, to get some feedback from this network. I undertake to use your information for this single purpose only.)

Moodle (and other VLEs) offer a dizzying array of activity types and resource types, each activity and resource then also have an almost unlimited number of settings and parameters. All of these variables makes it a daunting task to create on-line training. Our approach was to only focus on a few activities and resources that facilitates each of the six learning types from the Conversational Framework.

What were those Activities and Resources and how do they map from the theory?

All the other activities and resources in Moodle can similarly be mapped to the Conversational Framework's learning types, but we chose to limit ourselves to these four in order to get going quickly with our Moodle Crash Course.

Did it work? After only a week on the Moodle Crash Course we are seeing some of our technical training manuals turning into properly designed on-line material. From a student's guide to Ohms Law to safety when using a pedestal grinder to blasting practices in an underground coal mine. Are we there yet? No, but we are getting there.