Upcoming TELedvisors webinar Thursday 28 August 12 – 1 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Canberra)
Learning designers, education designers and technologists play a central role in the design and development of quality educational experiences. Yet this contribution remains largely hidden, undocumented and unacknowledged in the sector. This lack of visibility can leave designers without clear professional identities or documented evidence of impact.
Recent literature highlights the gap. Studies on learning design impact tend to measure the effects of design strategies, but rarely address the practitioners themselves. Researchers note that designers struggle to gain attribution for their work and often find it difficult to demonstrate their value to academic teams. Without concrete evidence, institutions (and students) miss out on the full benefits of design collaboration, and career progression becomes more challenging (Rienties, Nguyen, Holmes & Reedy, 2017; Bisset, 2018; Decherney & Levander, 2020; Ryttberg, 2022; Altena, Ng & Hinze, 2025).
To address these issues, we created the Learning Design Evidence Framework to support learning designers to develop their value proposition when in collaboration with academic teams, to guide them to be more intentional in those collaborations, and to provide a means to evidence the impact of good design in promoting quality teaching and learning to institutions. It is a means by which learning designers can ‘show’ what they ‘know and do’ (Boreland, Henry & Sharpe, 2025).
Join us as we explain the background of the Framework’s development, share how it’s already being used by practitioners in the sector, and facilitate a guided, hands-on experience using the Framework. There will also be an opportunity to share your thoughts and observations on how the Framework can help learning designers, educational designers and learning technologists make the invisible visible.
Making design contributions visible not only benefits individual practitioners but also strengthens collaborative practices across academic and professional roles. We look forward to sharing practical strategies and enhancing impact measurement strategies for participants.
Facilitators:
Jenny Boreland
Jenny has over 25 years’ experience in education, including 16 years in higher education in three Australian universities. She has held both academic and professional roles and has worked extensively with international students, higher degree research candidates and in executive and professional education. Currently, she manages a team of learning designers and is committed to supporting them and promoting their contribution to creating quality educational experiences for positive learner outcomes.
Sue Sharpe
Sue Sharpe is an educator and equity practitioner with 15 years’ experience working in higher education in a variety of roles including learning designer, education focused academic and course director. She is currently the Lecturer of Inclusive Education at Deakin University, an academic development role where she helps to bring an equity lens to current areas of change such as assessment and generative AI.
Tanya Henry
Tanya has over 20 years of experience in education, with expertise in programmatic assessment, curriculum design, and project management. As the Strategic Lead, Assessment Transformation, she provides strategic leadership and mentorship to a team of faculty-based Learning Designers who are driving Assessment Transformation as part of The University of Queensland’s Lead through Learning strategy.
Please register for this session here.
References
Altena, S., Ng, L. E. (Rebecca), & Hinze, M. (2025). Who are learning designers in post-pandemic Australasian universities? Higher Education Research & Development, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2482797
Bisset, D. (2018). Role of Educational Designers in Higher Education Institutions. In C. Bossu & N. Brown(eds), Professional and Support Staff in Higher Education (pp. 71-89), University Development and Administration series, Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6858-4_14
Boreland, J., Henry, T. & Sharpe, S. (2025). Knowing, doing and showing: a framework for evidencing education and learning designers’ practice in higher education, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, 33. doi: 10.47408/jldhe.vi33.1210.
Decherney, P., & Levander, C. (2020, April 24). The hottest job in higher education: Instructional designer. Inside Higher Education. Retrieved 7 August from https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/education-time-corona/hottest-job-higher-education-instructional-designer
Rienties, B., Nguyen, Q., Holmes, W. & Reedy, K. (2017). A review of ten years of implementation and research in aligning learning design with learning analytics at the Open University UK. Interaction Design & Architectures, vol. 33, 134–154. https://ixdea.org/33_7/
Ryttberg, M. (2022). Legitimacy Dynamics of Professional Support Staff at Higher Education Institutions. Higher Education Policy, 35(1), 218–233. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-020-00206-w