As I mentioned in How to Use Digital Learning – Part I (gee was that already months ago?) last June I had the priviledge of having work shared with the world alongside so many amazing contributors in the edited book How to use digital learning with confidence and creativity. I’ve been reading it from start to finish, though it’s designed for jumping to needed chapters. The chapters offer examples, advice, and theory without being too heavy on the latter. While useful for anyone beginning in digital learning, it is mainly aimed at higher ed faculty rather than other audiences. I’m reading it as an instructional designer and educational technologist with over a decade in higher ed and some outside experience. One overall note is that the contributors are from around the world, which I’ve found to be quite interesting as I compare to my experiences here in Canda.

This time we’re looking at section II, Theory. Speaking of theory, it is framed here as tools and frameworks for thinking. This makes the whole section bend toward the practical introduction the book intended to be. We get an introduction to the section from Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, explaining the intention behind the theory section (as tools and framework). A few things that stood out to me were the inclusion of Tim Fawns’ notion of entangled pedagogy, which also made a recent appearance at the Kawartha Teaching & Tech Conference 2025 by way of Kate Michell. I like the analogy Gearóid uses, “pedagogy before technology is an often-repeated phrase…used as a kind of talisman to ward off the evils of technology” (p. 115). I think that is a generous observation, but I quite like Brenna Clarke Grey’s explanation of the phrase as a thought-terminating cliché. This section, as explained, includes chapters on approaches to digital learning, followed by chapters on models and frameworks.

In Managing place and space in the context of blended and hybrid learning, Smyth and Smith review approaches to digital learning particularly in relation to delivery. Working in a few units in higher ed that dealt specifically with different modes, a focus on delivery and the complexities ce i therein are familiar to me. As soon as you get into this area, you’re required to define blended, hybrid and pretty much any other term your going to use. While it’s not referenced here, the work of Valerie Irvine highlights how confused the field of education is when it comes to these terms. A new, and interesting distinction the authors make here between blended and hybrid are that blended assumed a campus, face-to-face first modality. That aligns with my experience working on a series of blended learning courses at one university. The goal was to use technology to enhance flexibility for face-to-face classes. This also explains the use of the term “flipped classroom” which implies a classroom first approach to use of digital learning. As for hybrid, the authors here describe it to be online and on-site cohorts simultaneously. Online learning generally has a bad rep in the general public, even in early 2025 a judo friends of mine was asking me about my work and shared his kid’s experience in a university class during early pandemic days. While a lot of ink has been spilt on parsing emergency-remote teaching and online learning, I appreciate how the authors here call out the previous self-selection bias as one of those contributing elements to success in previous research in online learning. The authors offer some advice for student readiness to engage including support skills, assumptions about study spaces, and the technology available. The part that resonated with me was a mention about a wider consideration for institutions around technology support for blended learning. This reminded me of the lab kits that were requested for a science course I worked on. We’d hoped to assemble and issue lab kits to students, and in a budget conscious environment you can guess how that went. We ended up designing the course activities in a way that could be done with common household supplies and a little exploration of students’ neighbourhoods. Bring your own device (BYOD) was a big deal in the before times, I haven’t heard so much about it these days, but again, important to consider if we’re making delivery choices for students. They wrap up with some advice for managing blended and hybrid learning and spaces. One call out was around when you’d have students at a distance as the same time as those in class and the need for specially designed spaces. This made me think back to my time at the University of Helsinki’s Minerva Tori, and flexible space with technology integrated into every corner that would work well for this kind of setup. One specific, final point, I would add to those considerations is about audio. Blended privileging those in the classroom is no small thing to overlook. Distance participants can have a really hard time which a poorly conceived physical space on site. Consider your own experience where you’re at a distance and there is a group in a room on site. In so many cases the room on site has one microphone and one screen. Hearing anything as the distance person is a pretty horrid experience. A consideration might be getting microphones for smaller subsets of participants that can toggle them on and off. I worked with one program that operated at two sites (two groups one on our campus and the other at a distant campus). Each room had a puck microphone for each table in the room. While the single camera made people look far away, the microphones brought the students together in a much better way than I’ve seen in many other attempts at blended and hybrid learning. A final point I’ll make about on-site and distance participants is that the spaces we often have are specifically designed to make this a negative experience. No matter the technology you choose, if the acoustic architecture of the room has not been considered it’s a massive detriment to the experience for all.

Another approach for digital learning is scale – often a motive for looking to online and blended learning in the first place. Peter Bryant walks us through considerations for learning at scale in the next chapter. When it comes to scale I’ve seen cases where a 40 student face-to-face class is made into an 80 student online class, and then some pretty egregious moves to increase that to the 100s of students without adding additional support or compensation. So I appreciate Bryant noting,

The author moves through to challenge the assumption others would make that scale leads to less engagement and that small classes automatically mean high engagement; noting, “You cannot leverage scale without first designing for it” (p. 129). How does one design for scale? Bryant offers suggestions including crowdsourcing – learning practices like making, ideation, critique, digital citizenship etc. I really took to the examples provided and thought it would be nice to collect some examples that have personally touched me to add to the list:

• Novel in a Day: a project where over 100 authors attempted to complete NaNoWriMo in a day.
• #TvsZ: back in the before times, a digital version of Humans vs Zombies, which had emergent rules created through collaboration between players.
• A fedwiki happening: an online experience where Mike Caulfield taught participants about parallel hypertext in order to write. I ended up modeling some course designs after this without the parallel hypertext, it was really excellent.
• DS106: if you read this blog you may know about this already.
• ETMOOC: this is a deep cut from the MOOC days. The community developed here still meets I think.
• SPLOTbox: one of my all time favourite themes by Alan Levine where participants can share media and comment on it. I was fortunate to get updates made in order to get a geology course going where students contribute videos that aligned with the curriculum.
• there are more but we’d be here all day.

SPLOTbox actually ties nicely to the next chapter, by Darragh Coakley, Optimising face-to-face through digital: how to flip the classroom. If you’ve come across this term, you probably are thinking about Khan Academy, or various other pitches rising 10-15 years ago. The movement today seems to be synonymous with the ease of access to, and shear volume of, video. Coakley takes us back the the mid 1980s to show the concept has a much longer history than we’d expect. If you’re a reader of Audrey Watters’ work, this is familiar. Coakley describes various arrangements that could be considered “flipped”; it’s not always applied in a consistent way. In fact, it’s this characerstic that makes “…determining the overall effectiveness and success of the flipped classroom as a teaching method is not straightforward” (p. 134). Coakley covers a few key benefits and barriers to using the approach. Stakeholder effort is one of the named barriers, noting that implementing a flipped classroom requires more effort, particularly from learners. As I read that barrier next to the note about ensuring you make in-class time useful, I recalled an old workshop a colleague of mine ran at a center for teaching and learning. The workshop was how do I get students to do the readings? It’s a problem I hear time and again (even during open education week 2025), and I note here that the effort students put into the flipped learning approach is even more influential than the ensuring the class time is useful component. The approach hinges on student effort. The chapter concludes with four steps to use this approach yourself:

1. Set an intention
2. Identify existing content learners could absord by themselves
3. Develop and deploy the digital resources for the “out-of-class” learning
4. Plan the live classroom activities
5. Clearly communicate everything to learners

The steps are practical and the advice for each step is actionable and detailed. However, I might flip a few of these around if I were to implement the approach myself:

1. Set an intention
2. Plan the live classroom activities (knowing what you want here helps figure out what content would be needed for a successful class meeting)
3. Develop digital resources (what a wonderful opporunity to combine this with Peter Bryant’s previous chapter’s approach)
4. Clearly communicate everything to learners (this step here if you didn’t take Peter’s approach)
5. Deploy the resources in the LMS

Effectively all the same steps but the sequencing may provide additional opporunities that we often skip over when we take a content first approach (more on this when I hit the ID models chapter).

Nicola Whitton takes us on tour through Digital play and learning. I don’t think I’ve fully embraced digital play and learning since #TvsZ, so I was quite interested to see where things have gone in the past decade. Whitton grounds the chapter in a bit of history and calls out the potential criticism of play being “frivolous” early on, countering it with use cases and research in the context of higher education. Similar to previous chapters, a bit of terminology splicing is required as you might come across similar seeming terms like gamification, game-based learning, I’ve ever heard “gameful learning” before. Playful learning, “…embraces a whole suite of playful tools, tactics, and techniques that educators can employ to support teaching…openness, democracy, intrinsic motivation and willingness to embrace play, accept risks, and learn from failure” (p. 142). The key to unlocking this as an approach is the willingness of the participants to set into the “magic circle” – the place where the play happens. Does it have to be a game? Absolutely not. Whitton provides alternatives such as creating collaborative artworks. Whitton also cautions about approaches that can backfire, one such example is often used in gamification cases, point systems. While they may seem like they should engage students, they’re often superficial in nature. Whitton concludes with some of the challenges in applying playful learning in higher education. As I read this chapter, three examples I’ve been near came to mind. Of course, #TvsZ as I participated in seven rounds of the game. The second was a medical education elearning game. It applied scenario-based learning and game mechanics for a medical case where the learner has a snarky preceptor watching over them. The student must deal with different cases presented in their clinic. Every test the perform costs money (money meter) and many draw blood from the patient (blood meter). You can get to the end along a variety of paths and students who played started competing to see who could finish by spending the least and drawing the least blood from the patient. Finally, there was a Dungeons and Dragons esque game developed by Keegan Wheeler called GOBLIN.

When I did faculty development, I saw Keegan present this work and I so badly wanted to bring it to where I worked. Unfortunately, that never game to pass.

A number of the approaches discussed in section 2 so far include obvious needs for online course development at least in part. In higher education especially, once you cross from face-to-face to online you will often encounter discussions of instructional design. That is where the next chapter brings us, as Sarah Pattison answers the question What should I know about instructional design models? There have been a number of times I’ve seen calls for chapters on this very subject and almost submitted proposals myself. This is an area I can get quite passionate about. In this case of this book, I would have been the exact wrong person to write the chapter, I’d bring in way too much inside baseball. Afterall the book is a “practical introduction”. I think Pattison landed this chapter at a great level and approach given the intended audience. Right off the bat they identify how this introduction to ID models can benefit academic staff. Time for a little definition, which I appreciate as I get asked quesitons around this all the time (what’s an ID? What’s an Educational Developer? How are they different, etc.). Pattison defines the discussion for this chapter, “Instructional design involves the design and development of learning experiences in order to promote learning, and ID models work as a guide in that process” ( p.149). Pattison chose a hanful of models – a task I’d find excrutiatingly challenging – for their overall use and straightforwardness. What they don’t mention, and why this would be difficult, is because there are so many. The First edition of the Survey of ID Models (1981) included 36 distinct ID models. There are many more in the latest edition.

First up is ADDIE. While there is argument to be made that ADDIE is not actually a model, a cursorary web search will present it as such so I appreciate the inclusion of it here. So many people outside of the field encounter ADDIE as their first brush with instructional design, it is very much the elephant in the room. Pattison notes that ADDIE is “often considered waterfall” which is where a lot of the criticism about it comes from, but does not necessarily make that claim themselves. They discuss the phases of ADDIE and address some of the critiques, noting that “…in practice, however, ADDIE can be used in a more flexible, iterative way…” which is where much of the current research on ADDIE resides as well. Next up is Systems Approach, some know it as Dick & Carey. This is a widely used model, colleagues of mine often tried to communicate with various stakeholders that was the approach we used and not (waterfall) ADDIE. This model involves revision along various stages and some concurrent work around learner analysis and instructional analysis. This part concludes with some of the critiques of Systems Approach centering on its resource intensiveness, knock-on effects, and overemphasis on instructionalist approaches. The final model Pattison discusses is SAM (successive approximation model). SAM is often equated to the AGILE of the ID world (although sometimes you see job postings for IDs that include a requirement to know and use agile methodology). I’m not so surprised to see SAM here, because it might be the second most talked about model if you do a web search about ID. It appears in loads of job postings for IDs across sectors, and for good reason, it’s a solid approach. However, its use in higher education I would wager is very, very minimal. SAM is grounded in focuses learning using what Michael Allen described as CCAF (context, challenge, activity, feedback). This model is fantastic for developing practical (often elearning focused) learning that is performance driven. The vast majority of higher education courses mirror how textbooks are written and not CCAF. Not only that, but using this model includes a hefty “savvy startup” method with is a full on full day design exercise with many stakeholders. So while it would be great to use, it’s unlikely. One model that is very common, or at least gets a lot of lip service in North America is Backward Design (Wiggins & McTighe). This is a content-based model which fits into the higher edcuation context a bit better than other models, but is often no implemented as intended. Pattison rounds up the conversation noting limitations of using ID models, barriers to entry, and where to start. A very approachable chapter and I’d like to echo their call to connect with a learning department at your organization if you would like to use an ID model for your project(s).

Speaking of alternative models and approaches to instructional design, another, newer, one that has received quite a bit of uptake (in Europe at least) is the ABC Learning Design method. In this chapter, Clive Young and Nataša Perović outline the origin of the method through to localizing it for your context. I had the pleasure of meeting Clive and Nataša at EDEN 2019 in Bruges and got to experience a facilitated ABC workshop myself.

To begin, they provide some critique of other ID models, the usual dunking on traditional models for being too linear (some room for disagreement here, but another time) but more to the point, many are designed for contexts outside of higher education (like SAM as I mentioned above). Within the context of higher education, they point to research identifying a gap in terms of time available for faculty to design and develop courses as well as skills gaps. And rightfully so, point out, that models many higher education organizations apply for blended and online design and delivery do require time and resources to apply – some have quite high procedural overhead. So what is the solution they’ve come up with? A 90 minute workshop, similar to a jam session, to work out the design of a course. Throughout the workshop they guide participants to “Tweet their course” (140 character description), design students learning journey in six learning types (not to be confused with learning styles), and share their designs. After just 90 minutes you walk away with a high level look at what your course will be. This model is used for a variety of projects including: learning and assessment design, strategic development, change or review of a technical environment, quality assurance, and academic development, etc.

If I were still working in a CTL this is an approach I would adopt instead of the classic “course design” workshops I see around. It’s fast, practical, and expands one’s view on how you can quickly layout the design for a course without a lot of the pedantic nonsense workshops can be overloaded with.

We return again to modes of learning where Sue Beckingham helps us to “untangle the jargon and provide clear explanation for the terminology, as well as guidance for tutors adopting the different modes” (p. 168). This chapter feels like it would have paired nicely with where we began section two. One insight Sue brings is that all courses are blended; where homework systems are one manifestation of this (i.e. some digital learning even through primarily a course is in a classroom) – coexistence. It seems overseas they have a problem with defining terms as well, and thus that’s why Sue takes time here to untangle hybrid, hyflex, and blended terms. They first do this by laying out place (on campus or not) vs time (synchronous or asynchronous), followed by a mix of the two to bring in hybrid and hyflex. Overall, the application of different elements is shown in a diagram from a 2023 piece Modes of learning in higher education. Simple and digestible, this would be useful for anyone looking to try to build a shared understanding of terms and approaches in their institution. Sue then ends the chapter with a able with practical advice for in-person, distance, hybrid, and hyflex learning contexts.

Once you’ve thought about the mode(s) of learning you’re designing for, and chosen or applied your model to make it happen, you might naturally turn your attention to Quality Assurance. That is where Mark Brown picks up with conversation with a QA framework for digital education. Mark provides a review of Quality Assurance followed by critical analysis. QA can be categorized as external (e.g. accreditation/compliance – when I worked in post-graduate medical education we had two different accreditation standards I worked with at the time) and internal (e.g. continuous improvement). There are two points Mark makes early on that I think should be shouted from the rooftops: 1) efforts to create QA requirements should involved stakeholders (I’d go further to say they must be participatory), and 2) QA should be contextualized. Too often QA is a blunt instrument with no flexibility for the nuance sometimes required. By adhering to QA rubrics uncritically, for example, many support units (such as CTLs or online learning centers) hang an albatross about their own necks. Mark takes a deep dive on the literature around QA, a few of my own takeaways reading this review are that most QA looks at “easy” things such as inputs, processes, and resources instead of outputs and outcomes. The other is that it seems easy to create a framework (or rubric specifically) but not nearly as much oxygen is given to doing long term studies on the efficacy of QA frameworks. So, before you go off and create your own, take a look at what’s laying around already. The chapter moves onto comparing notable QA frameworks, looking at the domains, indicators, guides, action plans, and whether research was produced on its use. Notable gaps in the compared frameworks include 1) organizational culture (wow), and 2) faculty development (ties back to the failure to look at outputs than inputs). A quality consideration requiring increased attention above course levels included the “adoption of explicit learning design models” (p. 185). This ties back to the organizational culture and structure gap identified earlier in the chapter. It also ties to the PD element and I think is a gap due to the friction, if not contempt, for IDs or educational developers that can exist in higher education.

Dara Cassidy discusses a foundational framework (developed just north of where I reside in Treaty 6 Territory, Canada) for digital learning, the community of inquiry. COI might be the most cited writing in all of distance education literature, so it makes great sense that it appears in this collection of work. This chapter focuses on the original three types of presence: social, teaching, and cognitive. Social and teaching presence tend to be the more self-explanatory parts of the framework, while cognitive presence leaves audiences puzzled. The way Dara frames it should speak to anyone who has ever asked why don’t my students to the reading? “in simple terms, this involves creating tasks that require students to engage cognitively and collaboratively, and then supporting them to do so” (p. 191). Dara provides advice for fostering each type of presence. I thought it might be helpful here to add a few examples from my experience to the solid advice provided in the chapter:

• Fostering social presence: doing course introductions, including various media is grounded advice. Where I see this fall flat is by including the infamous “post once reply twice” method if the introductions are in a discussion forum. Image a course with 100s of students, it’s just too much. In one course we instead had students pin to a Padlet a piece of art that spoke to them, with a brief explanation of why. This encouraged natural interactions because students could gravitate to peers with shared perspectives while engaging with the discipline. Another might be a chain reaction style discussion instead of the P1R2 method.
• Fostering teaching presence: it’s often advised to maintain a regular schedule of announcements. This helps to keep students oriented and on track, but I’ve seen many courses where these are quite drab. The best, by far, example of announcements done in an engaging way that suited a course was Design1o1 from iVersity almost 15 years ago now. Every week we received a “letter” and a “postcard” from the instructor. The postcard was a <1 minute video greeting us from somewhere in the world where the design ideas we were to learn about originated from or were popular. The course notes were the letter format, a PDF that looks like an old handwritten note with some polaroids included.
• Fostering cognitive presence: the focus of the chapter is on discussions to do this, which is great especially if you use Stephen Brookfield’s work on discussion as a way of teaching. However, there are other ways to support cognitive presence. Recently I presented on branching scenarios in vet med with Jen and Julie and those students were incredibly engaged, both independently and in groups depending on how Jen implemented the activity.

So, you’ve thought about your course or program. Designed it maybe using the models or methods discussed previously. Considered the types of interactions and delivery modes. What else might you consider when actually developing the learning materials? Well, Roisin Garvey and Nicola Marsh discuss one important piece of this in their chapter, Digital Learning and Accessibility. The underlying concepts discussed are applicable around the world. I’m not sure the regulatory requirements in the UK, where the authors reside, but in Canada we have a couple of variances. In Ontario for example they have AODA, which dictates the requirements for accessibility (not just digital) for different organizations to uphold in the province. There are also some at the federal level for government agencies for example. But Canada is kind of like 11 countries in one, so requirements vary by province. That’s just on the requirement side. Should you, when designing and developing your course follow the advice in this chapter? Yes. Did we even need to ask? Accessibility is one of those words that can have a slightly different meaning depending on use and context, and the authors outline this focus for their chapter. They cover some of the fundamentals such as doing your best to prepare rather than be reactive, some of the considerations in universal design for learning (a popular design philosophy), a little about WCAG (the web standards for accessibility – for a detailed deep dive, I recommend Susi Miller’s book), and practical recommendations. One thing I did not see addressed was the structural barriers to being able to implement the very solid advice in this chapter. So my contribution here will be a story that has stuck to me like a burr since it happened. A real sore point that relates to the chapter’s topic.

Many instructors in higher education face significant challenges when creating accessible online courses. One such case involved a course where, as often happens, development occurred simultaneously with delivery due to lack of dedicated time and resources.
The instructor primarily used video recordings for course materials. When a student with hearing impairment enrolled and required closed captioning (which should have been standard practice), the search for support revealed troubling systemic gaps. The auto-generated captions were only about 50% accurate and needed substantial editing. Upon seeking assistance, it became clear that no department had adequate resources: the accessibility office lacked capacity, the academic department had no funds available,etc. While proactive accessibility measures are ideal, as Garvey and Marsh suggest, this situation highlights the serious structural barriers that exist. The instructor and development staff did their best with limited resources, but the experience shows why we need more discussion about these systemic issues rather than placing the entire burden on individual instructors. This isn’t about accepting defeat when facing accessibility challenges or working oneself to exhaustion. Rather, it’s about acknowledging and addressing the institutional barriers to creating truly accessible learning environments for all students.

The next chapter, Learning Transfer and Preparing Learners for Future Learning, by Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, was a fascinating read for me. Most of the time when I encounter learning and transfer, it’s in the context of workplace learning (do people actually apply what’s discussed in elearning in their job?) This is really hard to demonstrate and that is where Gearóid meets us. First, what is it? “Leanring transfer broadly relates to the influence of past experiences of learning on our ability to learn new things or carry out new tasks in the future” (p. 203). I appreciate the call out for the difficulty in investigating transfer, but also the author calling out industries like brain training apps or a proponent of “digital natives”, which turn out to not be based in evidence despite the media attention they garner – what’s embarrassing is that society never really learned because they’re believing this same person who is now running around saying kids these days will be “AI natives”. That sound you hear is me banging my head on the desk. In answering why we should worry about transfer Gearóid mentions, “the tendency to talk and think about digital learning as something that happens somewhere other than the ‘real world’ sets things up a bit for people to question what gets transferred from ‘there’ to ‘here’”. I locked onto this because it reminded me of something I think Anne Marie Scott mentioned years ago about either remote or online learning being misleading because the learning is something that always happens “in-person” quite literally. The rest of the chapter breaks down learning transfer research which is just a great read and introduction to the area. It touches on methodology, conclusions, and limitations of the current research, but in a plain language sort of way. It even touches on program evaluation which will be useful to anyone engaged in evaluating digital learning. I would like to point out one really important piece here, especially as I’ve faced a lot of faculty and program directors who constantly say “online learning doesn’t work”.

That is pure poetry. The chapter wraps up with a detailed discussion of preparation for future (digital) learning, and overall it reminded me quite a bit of the work of educational philosopher Alred North Whitehead.

The final chapter in this section tackles the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and digital learning. Leigh Graves Wolf lays the foundation for those new to the SDGs and bits for those already working in the area. Integrating the SDGs into courses was always the work of colleagues of mine in other areas, I would fall into the “new to the SDGs” camp for sure. The chapter begins with a bit of background, a pitch for the benefits of considering SDGs in digital learning and challenges implementing them in education. This is followed by a series of thinking tools and cross-cutting competencies such as systems thinking, strategic thinking, collaboration, and self-awareness. Similar to the overall construction of the book, you can pick up any of these tools individually, no need to start with number 1 and progress your way through.

If you’ve stuck around this long, thank you, but go check out the book! If you’ve been reading it, what stood out to you in this second section’s chapters?