Designing for Shifting Learning Activities

Existing approaches to instructional design each have a core focal unit of analysis; some focus on developing a specific tool, some focus on a sequence of tasks, and more recently, some approaches have focused more broadly on activities. However, we find that these don’t go far enough as real-world implementations require that learners move through a shifting sequence of activities with teachers attending to these shifts. We therefore propose and illustrate an approach to design grounded in focusing on how the design of activities, including tools, necessarily need to shift over time to support learning.