Learning Patterns

History

The idea of a pattern language comes from Christopher Alexander, an architect who wanted to help his clients define the features and functions of a space in their own words, rather than an architect’s. He identified recurring "patterns" that describe those features and functions, reusable across different design problems.

Peter Goodyear applied the same idea to education:

Design patterns have a number of qualities which, in combination, give them the potential to be a useful way of sharing experience in the field of networked learning. A pattern is a solution to a recurrent problem in a context.

— Peter Goodyear (AJET, 2005)

This library applies that idea to the seven Learning Types: a pattern language that makes learning design accessible to whoever’s in the room, not just the specialist, so co-design can happen through conversation rather than jargon.