EdtechGuides: Digital Learning Design guide: Choosing learning technologies

Digital Learning Design Toolkit

The university has a wide variety of supported educational or learning technologies. These include the broad array of activities within Moodle, and educational technologies for multimedia creation, student polling or virtual classrooms, and applications from within the Microsoft 365 environment which can be used for teaching and learning. As supported technologies, this means that these tools are considered to meet the university's accessibility and data security standards and we provide support for these tools.

Some staff can find the choice of educational technologies overwhelming. This Digital Learning Design Toolkit is intended to help you decide which technologies can help make those decisions easier. It does that in two ways – by providing a simple glossary of available tools and then by mapping them to different types of learning activity. The toolkit is part of LEaD’s approach to supporting learning design within digital education contexts such as blended, hybrid and online learning. It can be used as a standalone resource or as part of a storyboarding workshop for planning new or redesigning existing modules or programmes.

The toolkit does not include all options available within platforms such as Moodle or Microsoft 365. This is because some of them are intended purely for administrative purposes rather than educational ones.

Types of Learning

LEaD’s approach to Digital Learning Design derives from UCL’s ABC Learning Design method, which is itself based on Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (2012). This toolkit lists university-supported tools and maps them onto three of the learning types identified in Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (2012). Although Laurillard originally identified six types of learning that occur in higher education, we have found in the development of this service that design discussions can tend to centre on the semantic differences between the different learning types. We have therefore condensed the learning types from six to three, to support more focused discussions at the design stage.

The three learning types used in this kit are Acquisition, Collaboration and Practice:

Acquisition: learners acquire disciplinary knowledge through, for instance, lectures, presentations, videos, books, journal articles or digital media.
Collaboration: learners work together to construct a shared understanding of knowledge. They can use discussion, practice and peer feedback to produce a shared output to reflect on.
Practice: learners apply their conceptual understanding to achieving an authentic learning task. They may receive feedback from self-reflection, peers or the teacher.

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking university teaching: a conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies (2nd ed.). London: Routledge Falmer.

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. London: Routledge.

A-Z EdTech Toolkit

This PDF resources can be used to look up a tool in the table below and find which learning types that tool supports or enables. More accessible versions of these resources are in development; this page will be updated when those versions are available.

Digital Learning Design Toolkit
This PDF document contains information to help staff choose appropriate learning technologies for learning activities.

Table listing university-supported learning technologies and their pedagogical uses
Code	Technology	Description
As	Assignment	Enables students to submit coursework as a file upload of online text, and where the lecturer can assess, grade and provide feedback on the coursework.
Bo	Book	Create multipage resources in a sequential, easy-to-navigate and printable format. Ideal resource for presenting manuals or large amounts of information, including multimedia.
Cb	City Blogs	The university's blogging platform, based on WordPress. Options include personal reflective blogs for students, class blogs for module leaders, or collaborative blogs.
Ce	Checklist	Allows a lecturer to create a checklist for students to work through. Students tick off each item as they complete it and lecturers can track the resulting progress of the class.
Co	Choice	Allows students to select one option from a choice of multiple responses. Can be useful as a quick poll to stimulate thinking about a topic or enable students to vote on module issues.
Da	Database	Allows lecturers and students to contribute to and search a bank of content, which can consist of text entries, images, URLs, files, etc.
Ex	Excel	Spreadsheet application that supports creating, viewing, editing, sharing and collaborating with others. Includes calculation and computation capabilities, graphing tools and pivot tables for working with large data sets.
Fe	Feedback	Enables a lecturer to create a custom survey for collecting feedback using a variety of question types, including multiple choice, yes/no or text input.
Fi	File	Enables a lecturer to provide a file as a course resource, which can be displayed within the course interface or for download.
Fl	Folder	Enables a lecturer to display a number of related files within a single folder, thus reducing the need for scrolling on a module page.
Fo	Forms	Online survey creator, allowing users to create surveys and quizzes with automatic marking. The data can be easily exported to Excel.
Fr	Forum	Enables participants to have asynchronous discussions. Types include standard forum (anyone can start a discussion), Q&A forum, or single simple discussion.
Gl	Glossary	Enables participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, or to collect and organise resources or information.
Hp	H5P	Enables the creation of a rich variety of interactive content, such as interactive videos, drag and drop questions, presentations, and much more.
Kc	Kaltura Capture	A standalone screen capture program that can be used for creating screencasts, video and audio recordings on personal computers.
Km	Kaltura MediaSpace	The university's media platform, like an institutional YouTube. Allows for the uploading, storing and sharing of video and audio files. Fully integrated into Moodle.
La	Label	Can be used to improve the appearance of a module. Basic labels enable text and multimedia to be inserted into the module page. Enhanced labels allow drop-down sections, popup boxes, etc.
Lc	Lecture Capture	Echo360 allows for the live streaming or scheduling of automatic recordings of in-room lectures and presentations, enabling students to review lecture recordings after the event.
Le	Lesson	Enables a lecturer to deliver content or practice activities to create a series of pathways or options for students, for self-directed learning, scenarios, simulations or decision-making.
Ls	Learning On Screen	On demand TV and radio service for higher education, allowing staff and students to record programmes, search a broadcasts archive and embed content in Moodle (formerly ‘Box of Broadcasts’).
On	OneNote	Note-taking application for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. Gathers notes, drawings, screen clippings, audio files and more.
Np	Narrated PowerPoint	Audio/video recording facility for narrating a PowerPoint presentation. Can be exported as a video and uploaded to MediaSpace.
Pa	Page	Enables the creation of a web page resourse, which can display text, images, sound, video, web links and embedded code, such as Google Maps.
Pc	Podcast	Audio recording to be shared with others (within Moodle or over the Internet), generally grouped together to form a series or collection.
Pd	PDF	File format developed by Adobe for presenting documents, including text formatting and images, independently of software, hardware or operating system.
Pe	Peer Assessment	Group assignment submission combined with peer grading, enabling file submission of a group activity as well as ability for students to assess contributions of peers.
Pl	Planner	Team-work oriented planning application enabling users and teams to create plans, assemble and assign tasks, and receive progress updates.
Po	Poll Everywhere	Student response system that allows for student participation via mobile devices. Polls, quizzes and competitions can be displayed in real time, with their answers.
Pp	PowerPoint	Presentation program for creating, editing, viewing, sharing and collaborating with others on slideshow files.
Qu	Quiz	Enables the creation of quizzes comprising questions of various types, including multiple choice, matching, short answer and numerical. Automated marking (except essay questions) with grade recorded in gradebook.
Rl	Reading Lists Online	Curated list of relevant course readings, often including links to actual resources, enabling lecturers to display relevant resources at the right time in a module.
Sh	SharePoint	Web-based collaboration platform with wide variety of uses, including document storage, public-facing websites, enterprise wikis and general team communication.
Tm	Teams Meetings	One of the university's Virtual Classroom solutions, Teams Meetings enable video and audio calls as well as screen sharing. Can operate within a Teams site or outside of one via Microsoft Outlook.
Ts	Teams Sites	A flexible collaboration platform that supports asynchronous chat discussion, file and information sharing, and integration of other web tools. Also includes Teams Meetings functionality.
Tu	Turnitin Assignment	Online assessment management system to support student submission, provision of grades, feedback, and similarity checking against other texts.
Ur	URL	Allows the display of hyperlinks to open web pages on a Moodle module. Links can be displayed in different ways - embedded within a Moodle Page, open in a browser window or as a pop-up.
Va	Video Assignment	Allows students to submit coursework in video or audio formats and lecturers to provide grades and feedback.
Vi	Visio	Diagramming application enabling individual or collaborative creation of a variety of diagrams, including flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, process diagrams and business processes.
Vr	Video Resource	Enables the easy addition of any video or audio resources hosted on Kaltura MediaSpace to be added to Moodle modules for students to access.
Wh	Whiteboard	Virtual whiteboard available as a standalone app and within Microsoft Teams that also enables real-time whiteboard collaboration between users.
Wi	Wiki	Moodle-based system for users to be able to edit and collaborate on a set of linked pages. Each member has equal editing rights.
Wo	Word	Word processing and document creation software. Supports creating, editing, viewing, sharing and collaborating on documents with others.
Wk	Workshop	Activity module that enables the collection, review and peer assessment of students’ work. Students can submit any digital content and type directly into a field using the text editor.
Zo	Zoom	One of the university's Virtual Classroom solutions, which can be used for running online lectures, seminars and tutorials. Zoom is also integrated into our hybrid learning spaces (aka ‘ISLA rooms’).