Insitu learning designers take part in ‘design jam’ to help startup ventures

How much learning design can you do in 1 hour? Quite a lot it turns out! Working with learning designers from different sectors some of the Insitu learning design team recently took part in a Learning Design Jam organised by the excellent Learner Experience Designers Meetup in London.

In the space of 1 hour, four startup ventures working with young people, social policy and healthcare got some help and guidance with their learning design problems.

At Insitu, we love the mashup of creativity and strategic business thinking that happens within the learning design activity to help companies achieve their business goals and improve employee performance with smarter learning.

Whilst we don’t normally work at such an accelerated pace, bringing talented teams together is our bread and butter, so we felt right at home with the learning design jam process.

The learning design jam was a great opportunity to learn from other learning designers working across different sectors whilst also giving back to the community, witness different thinking around solving a problem and then use the skills within the team to put together a presentation and possible plan of action.

What did we learn? Well, 1 hour was certainly not enough time to come up with a complete learning design solution for the 4 startups that evening, but the time limit did have the effect of focusing down to identify the core issue, flag up problems to be addressed, and give some guidance on routes to success. The startup ventures certainly found this a very valuable activity for helping to unblock their thinking and move forward. We learnt about different approaches to thinking about learning design from people working in sectors different to our own and picked up some useful ideas that we can blend into our own workflow.

If you are working in the learning design space, we’d recommend looking out for further events organised by the Learning Experience Designers group. It’s so important to keep working on your own learning and sharing experiences with other professionals in the field.

And if you’re needing help with your own learning design or communication challenges, get in touch and hopefully, we can start working together.