Designing the pedagogies for student support on the large scale

The field of Learning Design now has an interesting challenge. With the prominence of MOOCs and the related field of Learning Analytics, there is an expectation that learning technology will now be able to solve the problem of the worldwide demand for higher education (currently estimated as ~ 100 m per year). This is a problem that all of us in LD recognise and probably share as being the most important to be solved in the field of education. But our approach is different. How will the future development of Learning Design contribute to solving that problem? This paper will consider how the attributes of the field provide the means to do it. They were set out in the Larnaca Declaration: the focus on pedagogy in all its forms, the description of learning designs as computational objects, the sharing of ideas, the scope across all sectors and subject areas, the pedagogic categorisation of learning designs, the attention to what students do in order to learn, the mapping to implementations, the focus on effectiveness. To meet the demand for education we have to provide the level of nurturing and guidance every student needs if they are to attain their learning potential. Given the scale of the demand, this means moving from the current norm of a 1:25 staff student ratio to a much higher ratio, without loss to the student´s attainment. At present it is impossible to do this at the high ratio the level of demand requires, but technology is good at solving large-scale challenges. If there is a solution to be found it will come from the teaching community collaborating to design, test, improve and share the pedagogies that achieve high quality student support and attainment on the large scale. To do it, we need all the attributes of Learning Design. So we need a clear consensus of what they are in order to represent them in what we do.