Making Teaching and Learning Visible: How Can Learning Designs Be Represented?

This work is situated in the context of the Learning Design research area. It reviews different forms in which learning designs can be represented both in textual or in a graphical way. The different forms have been gathered from the options used by teachers in current practice and from proposals of the research community. The following categories have been defined to classify the several representation types into a clear and concise classification: Narrative Text; Forms/Templates; Table Representations/Matrices; Concept Maps, Mind Maps and Tree based Representations; Flow Diagrams; Sequential Diagrams; and Ad-hoc Diagrams. For each type of representation specific examples and uses are provided, showing the benefits and contexts in which they are used. Text-based representations are common in the real teachers' practice, while graphical representations have been taken from research initiatives. The goal of the paper is to attract attention to the fact that no type of representation for learning designs has been adopted as a mainstream, yet. A common language in this domain would be desirable and could offer great benefits related to the communication and sharing of teaching and learning results. This could be very useful for the representation of learning designs and teaching practices in learning analytics dashboards.