About Pattern Learning

Higher education has spent decades refining pedagogy and how we teach. Pattern Learning starts from a different question: how do we learn, and how do we design for that experience?

I’m Tim Klapdor. I’ve spent close to two decades in learning design and educational technology in higher education, including building the University of Adelaide’s fully online program portfolio from the ground up, leading learning design and course development. At Charles Sturt University’s uImagine innovation lab I contributed to the development of innovative projects centred around online learning and improving the learning experience. Across my work, the same gaps keep showing up: while there is a depth of information about teaching, there’s not even a shared vocabulary for talking about learning.

Pattern Learning grew out of two resources I built to close that gap:

• Learning Types draws on Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework and schema theory: the idea that learning happens when we take new information and connect it to what we already know. From that, seven learning types describe the different ways people make those connections – assimilative, investigative, discursive, formative, productive, evaluative and social.
• Learning Patterns borrows the idea of a pattern language from architect Christopher Alexander, who used it to help his clients define the features of a space in their own words. Applied to learning design, each pattern is a reusable, technology-agnostic solution to a recurring design problem, aligned to a specific Learning Type.

These two innovations have shaped my practice and how I work, and formed the keystones for developing systems and tools for learning design. These now tried-and-tested methods have been used across hundreds of courses. Pattern Learning brings these ideas together with design practice, to help organisations create and develop richer, more effective learning experiences for staff, students and clients.

Get in touch: tim@patternlearning.co