What are students 'designing'?

When setting out my idea of students as designers of learning, I wasn’t very specific about what that would actually involve, though I had some examples in mind. There are many ways students design their own learning and the learning of others. My problem is to define what I want to (and can) research.

I don’t think there are many tertiary courses that are designed to allow students a lot of choice in what they do and how they interact. Whether it is designed that way or not, however, students do shape their own learning. I think that students, by their choices of going to lectures or not, attending - and participating or not - in tutorials, how they write an essay, how they study in groups, how they share notes or comments on the course, means that they are consciously or subconsciously designing learning.

I guess designing in its truest sense only happens consciously: design is a deliberate process. And if you are talking about designing learning, it is also a metacognitive process.

Examples of student learning design:

• Student as researcher, both undergraduate and postgraduate
• Collaborative note-taking - in place of teacher-provided lecture notes
• Student-organised study groups; informal participation in community of students - extracurricular activity
• Setting own essay question or area of interest for a project
• Setting goals for a career and pursuing relevant courses, connections and experiences
• Participation/community engagement and intern positions
• Formal and informal student input into designing learning environments
• Actual design activities; situated problem solving; student as producer
• Peerwise and other peer-contributed learning tools
• Students taking responsibility for ‘teaching’ part of curriculum

Even within formally prescribed tasks, students have control over many aspects of how to go about the task: how to monitor progress, set goals, collaborate and communicate and how and what tools to use, for example.

I'm going to be looking where technologies support students' deliberate learning activities.