Our online master’s programmes provide a leading digital learning experience, meaning students can receive a King’s education from anywhere in the world.
Transitioning academic’s teaching materials into engaging online content is the essential work of the King's Digital internal Learning Design team. We’ve been speaking to France Barth, Senior Learning Designer, and Lindsey Fulker, Learning Designer, about their work and the process of creating a captivating and informative online learning experience.
What is Learning Design?
As Learning Designers, we work side-by-side with academics to create effective, engaging, and efficient learning experiences for students. It’s not a case of taking teaching materials and turning them into PDFs or inviting students to join online lectures. Instead at King’s, we work directly with faculty and module leads to deliberately structure and plan a tailored learning experience that allows students to become subject experts.
We’re essentially like digital architects; carefully curating the structure of online programmes to ensure students can proactively digest teaching materials and fulfil their learning journey. Everything we do is centred on creating the best study experience for online learners that, whilst different in format, is equal to on-campus teaching.
We’re not just funnelling a lot of content into student’s brains; this is a carefully mapped journey with different learning activities throughout.
Most of our students are working professionals who opt to study online due to multiple time commitments. Therefore, it’s important for us to take into consideration the time limits facing students when building part-time master’s programmes.
Active learning is a key element of the programme design, meaning students can complete short lessons that have repeat practice throughout the week.
Learning steps come in a variety of forms; from lessons containing reading, videos and graphics, to activities such as investigation, analysis tasks and quizzes which help embed knowledge, and asynchronous forums and live webinars to facilitate discussion.
Everything we design keeps in mind that students won’t always have hours on end to work through materials and may want to study in frequent bitesize chunks. Therefore, we build a range of activities online to help students retain information and stay engaged.
What do you enjoy most in your role as a Learning Designer?
In addition to working in such a great team, it’s a privilege to have access to all this content. Talking to subject experts on a one-to-one basis and diving into the programmes they’ve developed first hand with them is amazing. You gain an education in fascinating subjects whilst doing your job!
It’s a privilege to talk to experts and really dive into the meaning behind it all: what’s their ethos, what are their opinions and what are they trying to teach.
Thank you to France and Lindsey for speaking to us about their work!
Discover more about our online master’s programmes:
