Making sense of learning design

Co-teaching within a blended educational environment

Abstract

Large classes seem to be a permanent fixture in tertiary education, often necessitating the use of multiple teachers to design and enact learning activities with many students. Within these multi-teacher learning environments, there is a need to gain a deeper understanding of the ways teachers make learning designs meaningful through their pedagogical beliefs. Employing the terms “design-for-use” and “design-in-use” (Folcher, 2003, p. 647) to draw a distinction between planned and enacted design, this paper reports on a qualitative study that followed the experiences of three teachers in a blended tertiary-level business writing course. The findings suggest that the teachers related to the same learning design in differing and conflicting ways, revealing the relative nature of “pedagogical sense-making” (Goodyear, Markauskaite, & Kali, 2010, p. 16), and paving the way for a more extensive discussion of co-teaching within ICT-supported learning environments.