Context: The Colombian higher education system

Higher education in Colombia is offered by public and private higher education institutions (HEIs) under the parameters established by the Ministerio de Educación Nacional (Ministry of National Education) (MEN). In 2020, the country had 298 HEIs. Private HEIs have autonomy, according to which they can be governed by their own statutes; public HEIs are governed by national statutes. In addition, the constitutional right to academic freedom gives teachers autonomy to choose how they teach within the framework of a programme that must be approved by MEN before it can be offered to students.  

According to the Colombian Constitution of 1991 (art. 69), the State has the responsibility to facilitate financial mechanisms that make possible the access of all persons eligible for higher education to this education level. By contrast, the Sistema Nacional de Información de la Educación Superior (National Higher Education Information System) (SNIES) (2021) reports that the rate of coverage in higher education in Colombia for 2020 was 52% with an immediate transition rate – that is, the proportion of students who go directly from high school into higher education – between 2019 and 2020 of 40%. This shows the great challenges that the country faces in higher education. A look at coverage rate by regions, departments and cities also reveals significant differences between large capitals and smaller cities. Of the total number of graduates in the country, in 2019, 56% were in three big regions: Bogotá, the capital city (35%), Antioquia (13%) and Valle del Cauca (8%) (Ministerio de Educación Nacional, 2021).

Higher education in Colombia is comprised of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Undergraduate programmes have three levels of training: professional technical, technological, and professional. Postgraduate programmes also include three levels: specialisations, masters and doctorates. The total enrollment in higher education for the year 2020 was 2,355,603 students, of which 51% were in the public higher education sector, and the remaining 49% in the private higher education sector. In total, 53% of students were women; gender data is only classified in terms of male or female (SNIES, 2021).

According to Decree 1330 of 2019 (Congreso de la República, 2019), higher education programs can be offered in face-to-face distance, virtual, dual, or combinations of these modes. By 2020, nearly 80% of enrollment was in face-to-face programmes, almost 10% were distance mode and just over 10% were online. In contrast, 0.002% involved dual modality, being partly in the educational institution and partly in industry (SNIES, 2021).

Distance education has been present in Colombian higher education since the 1970s (González et al., 2000). Online education is considered a generation of distance education that offers an opportunity to increase educational coverage in the country. However, achieving this entails at least two kinds of challenges: the first, accessibility due to the technological and connectivity conditions required; the second, this paper’s focus, is the pedagogical perspective. According to Rama, 

some expressions of virtual education are highly effective in transferring knowledge and information, but they also have limitations building professional skills when based on traditional flat instructional resources, little interaction, little diversity of resources and lack of practical self-learning applications (2013, p. 25). (Author’s own translation).

The inadequate management of accessibility risks increasing, or at least sustaining, the access gaps instead of decreasing them. At the same time, the inadequate management of pedagogical risks can lead to programmes of inadequate quality that do not allow students to achieve their learning outcomes or perform in workplaces as expected. If higher education coverage is to be increased, the country needs to continue working on technological and connectivity challenges and the universities on the development of appropriate pedagogical approaches.

Instructional Design or Learning Design? 

This section distinguishes between “instructional design” and “learning design”, whose main differences lie in their emphasis. The purpose of this section is not to unravel their substantive differences or to build deep reflections on these differences. Rather, it aims to reveal that each stance has different implications for the design of learning experiences carried out by pedagogical advisors.

Instructional design is a systematic process that seeks to develop learning systems, aims to create resources to facilitate learning, and involves interdisciplinary work (Patiño & Martínez Cantú, 2019). It has also been understood as “a systematic procedure in which educational and training programs are developed and composed aiming at a substantial improvement of learning” (Seel et al., 2007, p. 1). Learning design is understood “as the key for providing efficient, effective, and enjoyable learning experiences” (Wasson & Kirschner, 2020). The key principle in learning design is that it “represents the learning activities and the support activities that are performed by different persons (learners, teachers) in the context of a unit of learning” (Koper, 2006, cited in Seel et al., 2017, p. 4). For Wasson and Kirschner (2020), the difference between instructional design and learning design lies in the emphasis of the goal. The emphasis in instructional design is on teaching - hence instruction, while learning design focuses on learning; the former focuses on teaching activities, while the latter on learning activities (Seel et al., 2017).

Weaving learning designs

The design of learning experiences is an interdisciplinary and systematic process that aims to promote learning in a given context. This may be in an academic programme or in the interests of an entity, organisation or person. The pedagogical advisor’s role in the design of these experiences is to accompany the teacher in the realisation of his or her pedagogical intentions and in achieving the goal that he or she determines for the students, as well as the paths to follow to reach it. Students should also have everything they need to achieve their learning goals, whether these be resources or a conducive environment. 

But, does “accompanying” imply collaboration and teamwork? While collaboration and teamwork would seem to be an intrinsic aspect of “accompanying” teachers,  depending on the institutional model, the work team may be consolidated as a distributed team. It doesn’t mean a team which works remotely. Rather it is one that may never meet but works in a chain in which some links depend on others, but do not establish a direct interaction for achieving their proposed products. Thus,  there is the possibility that the members of the team may not get to know each other or work together at any time.      

It will be seen later how the approach towards instruction or learning has a lot to do with the organisation and characteristics of the teachers. 

The metaphor of the fabric and the weaver to talk about the design and development of learning and teaching experiences will allow us to see the learning experiences as the fabric that the learning designer helps to make. Thus, the weaver is responsible for using the right tools for the existing raw material.

First thread: The teacher (or subject matter expert)

The learning design process for online higher education courses and programmes has as its starting point a subject matter expert (SME), who is often a teacher but may also be a consultant or industry professional hired to participate in the development of a course. We will take the teacher as the first thread in the woven framework. However, it is difficult to speak of the “university teacher” as a homogeneous category in which all fit (Hernández et al., 2009). Teachers’ characteristics differ in terms of, for example, their areas of knowledge and their demographic characteristics. So, to feed the metaphor, let's say that this first thread is actually many yarns, of many textures and colours.

Diverse skills and pedagogical approaches

Teachers have different skills for their teaching practice in pedagogical terms. They also differ in terms of the integration of disciplinary knowledge, techniques and methods for making decisions about the way they organise teaching and learning processes (Héndez Puerto, 2012). In Colombia, recent regulations concerning the quality of training programmes in higher education have included the requirement of pedagogical training for teachers in order to address these disparities in approach.

However, it is up to the universities to establish the specific criteria, the follow-up indicators, and the level at which professional development takes place. Thus, it is common to include the pedagogical dimension within the teacher assessment process (Bogoya-Maldonado et al., 2020). Despite institutional commitments and regulatory requirements, the development of these skills requires motivation and vocation from university teachers.
It is well known that many educational institutions promote intellectual production and research above teaching performance. They even privilege and give greater status to the consultancy activities of university outreach than to teaching itself. I have accompanied several teachers interested in their pedagogical growth who felt disincentivised by organisational conditions in this regard.

Both training and vocation, dyes of this thread, are closely related to the framework of understanding of teaching and learning that each teacher has. Although it may seem anachronistic, we still have teachers who are convinced of the need for a hierarchical relationship with a unidirectional tendency towards students, which can become a challenge when working alongside a learning designer. These teachers are not necessarily older. Small transformations in their teaching framework reached in the process of accompaniment can be highly significant if the starting point is considered. On the other side of the spectrum are teachers who are interested in and reflective of their pedagogical perspective and therefore seek substantial transformations; they can challenge even the most expert learning designers with their knowledge.

Diverse expectations relating to the pedagogical advisor and other support entities

What else gives texture to this thread? The teacher's expectations about the pedagogical advisor - this goes hand in hand with everything that constitutes the learning design project. There are also the features of the project which give texture to the thread. Is it a course within a formal higher education programme or one of continuing or lifelong education? Is the project carried out by a team from the university or by an external team? Will the person who designs the course also facilitate it?

The answers to these questions define the nature of the entire project and the teacher’s perspective on the support s/he receives. For example, when the teacher will be the implementer and the course is part of their career within an institution, there may be more willingness on their part to engage in the design of a great pedagogical experience. Whereas, when the teacher acts exclusively as a thematic expert who generates the structure for others to deploy the course, it is more likely that s/he will have a limited role, restrictive in comparison to the possible reflective spirals that can be achieved in other cases. There are also projects conducted by external teams or for external users. For example, when the university builds a corporate education offering for an organisation, such organisations usually have the vision of a concrete service rather than that of an educational process. In this case, teachers can feel that their roles, their conceptions and their educational practices are challenged.

Most commonly, in face-to-face teaching, teachers design and implement their classes without additional support, although, increasingly, universities have support units that can be approached for specific advice or guidance. These may be available centrally or in each of its faculties, departments, or schools. Some units are specifically oriented to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for teaching and learning. For some teachers, support units offer technology-based support, focusing on selecting the right tool or learning how to use it. For others, they understand that they will get pedagogical support for their teaching, which implies transformations according to the mode of provision. Others may assume it as a contribution aimed at strengthening the student’s learning process, not their teaching practice. And, when the courses are seen as products, the unit is seen as support for production.

Diverse teacher literacies and pedagogical practices

One last aspect to talk about in considering the nuances of teachers is multiple literacies and how this relates to their pedagogical practices. There are different definitions and understandings of these multiple literacies and they are considered to have enormous implications for the quality of learning experiences (Sutton, 2006). These literacies are related to the ability to read and write critically and possibly in multiple languages. From a sociocultural perspective, it is understood that being literate is not only knowing how to decode messages but also having a critical capacity to understand and generate communicative scenarios and thus generate and transform reality (Freire & Macedo, 1989; Gee, 2005; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008, cited in Héndez Puerto, 2012). Literacies are limitless and change according to specific cultural environments.

When talking about online teaching and learning, several aspects are relevant, including multiple languages and communicative scenarios and flexibility of educational practices. The incorporation of technologies to conduct educational processes and as a tool to strengthen the learning experience, is aligned with the concept of literacies. These digital literacies involve a breadth of media, channels of communication as well as cultural and linguistic diversity (Héndez Puerto, 2012). For example, one current digital literacy is data management and, in this case, the management of information from monitoring the learning process (Wasson & Kirschner, 2020):

Ellen Mandinach introduced the concept pedagogical data literacy, which she defines as “the ability to transform information into actionable instructional knowledge and practices by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting all types of data (assessment, school climate, behavioural, snapshot, etc.) to help determine instructional steps. (Wasson & Kirschner, 2020, p. 825)

In a broad sense, technology has a multidimensional role that touches in many ways on teachers’ skills to manage their professional roles (and their personal lives), and to improve the teaching and learning processes they lead.
Is any teacher, simply by being a teacher, capable of designing learning environments that respond to the needs of students? University teachers are increasingly facing new demands to carry out their teaching practices. As transmission approaches to learning continue to be challenged, the kinds of disciplinary, pedagogical and technological knowledge required to teach changes and, further, remain in flux. Placing the student at the centre requires that the teacher know how to communicate and how to teach in ways that reach the students, or that are accessible to the student. Moreover, as education ecosystems are transformed, becoming increasingly diverse, the skills required to teach in these scenarios also expand.

The different transformations in society lead us to think about the need for teachers to focus more on enabling the learning of others than on teaching (Héndez Puerto, 2012). This reveals, on my part, an inclination towards the learning design perspective. However, it is pertinent to say that although this need was identified and described years ago, it cannot be said that it is currently fully resolved. Today, we continue to work with teachers to find ways to put the student at the centre. It is imperative that education prepares students for the current times in which they live and, especially, for the future. Education must enable them to learn to act appropriately in accordance with the transformations of their environment: this is a challenge for all of us who work in education.

These are just some of the elements that characterise "university teachers" as one of the threads that build the learning experience in which pedagogical advisors are carefully involved.

Second thread: The university

If we were to look for structure in the fabric of the learning experience, the teacher is both the warp and the weft. However, the teacher is not alone and is not the only determinant. Teachers are part of a system with specific but varying attributes that allow for the construction of learning experiences. Since the teacher is the main thread, I will only present some general ideas about the HEIs.

Diverse national and institutional development plans

Colombian HEIs are regulated by MEN and governed by national laws and regulations. They must also respond to the initiatives of national governments elected every four years which are included in their development plans. To avoid disruptions as a result of these government cycles, longer-term plans, such as ten-year plans, are drawn up to guide educational policy actions. In this way, HEIs are expected to be part of national and local efforts, but the alignment between these levels of government and the HEIs’ own plans does not always allow them to remain synchronised.

In this sense, HEIs have their own development plans that establish their horizon in specific periods of time. However, not everything that happens is established in a top-down manner, as some efforts arise from the basis of individual or group initiatives of teachers. For example, in some universities in which I have worked, ICT-supported educational innovation support areas were "faculty efforts" at the beginning. These evolved into specific departments, dedicated to providing this support to entire universities. In short, change is both top-down and bottom-up.

The type of goals and purposes that each educational institution sets for itself may vary according to contrasting interests, values and goals. Educational innovation for the transformation of teaching practices and the improvement of learning could be a goal; but there is also the goal of growing enrolment through the incorporation of other modes of provision, as well as the purpose of increasing university income through continuing education. The desire to improve education and learning may also seek to find other and better ways for: students to achieve their learning goals; lowering dropout rates; increasing access for under-represented groups; or improving the skills of professionals through non-formal education.

Diverse institutional configurations and modes of operation

To show how the institutional perspective is central in the type of experiences that are designed, I will describe how three Colombian universities orientate to the growth of online learning. Through a brief description of their historical engagement with online learning, their configurations and modes of operation, I briefly sketch how these institutions intend to support online learning and seek to grow their online offerings as part of their development plans. It is not my intention to compare these institutions, nor do I speak on their behalf. Instead, I am referring primarily to information that is public knowledge and not to information that I had special access to because of my work with them. Furthermore, I refer, in varying levels of detail, to each of them for the purposes of this chapter.

The first university has engaged in a variety of initiatives to strengthen the digital skills of teachers and educational innovation. One of these initiatives, which took place around 2008, invited calls for proposals to finance the creation of digital educational resources and virtual learning objects (VLOs). Once the VLOs were completed, they were made available to the broader community (not just the university) through an online repository. In these calls for proposals, the teachers received pedagogical, technological and design support to carry out and develop their ideas. There was a permanent team of people for general projects who led the people hired to support the projects identified through the call for proposals.

The second university ventured into virtual education with a virtual specialisation in 2003. Since then, it has maintained a permanent interest in alternatives that incorporate online educational initiatives, including the development of continuing education courses, the incorporation of modules in graduate programmes and the strengthening of digital skills of undergraduate teachers. It also offered undergraduate teachers pedagogical, multimedia and technological support for the design of educational resources for their face-to-face courses or the redesign of their courses to blended mode. Currently, this university has set goals for growth in enrolment and an increase in the number of programmes offered through virtual or blended mode, as established in its Institutional Development Plan 2016–2025 (Quiceno, 2015). In the early days of online initiatives, the university had a core administrative team and operated through interdisciplinary teams working on specific projects.

The third university has included in its current development plan (2021–2025) the consolidation of a virtual campus and the promotion of online postgraduate programmes, aiming to increase online enrolment. Since 2012, this university’s Centro de Innovación en Tecnología y Educación (Conecta-TE) has aimed to support educational change through supporting teachers and students in pedagogical innovation processes that take advantage of the potential of ICTs. Pedagogical, technological and multimedia teams advise the teachers. There is also a software development team and an educational evaluation team. Most staff are hired on a permanent basis and the organisation seeks to consolidate these teams from their disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives to grow and improve their strategies. Conecta-TE does not only offer a response to a specific project, but also addresses the manifestation of an institutional vision.

It is evident that these three institutions have different configurations and modes of operation. There are many others in the country with different configurations in this area. For example, some HEIs have small base teams that grow according to the demand of their projects, others establish internal teams that are responsible for the projects; some only have external teams that are hired on an ad hoc basis per project (Roldán López, 2013). In this sense, each HEI organises its strategies and ways of working based on its own principles, values and goals; in the same way that it organises its organisational structure. These configurations usually have great implications for the projects or may respond to their characteristics. For example, the organisational system of an institution focused on transforming its teaching culture may not be organised in the same way as one focused specifically on enrolment growth.

The weaver: The pedagogical advisor

Why use the metaphor of the fabric and the weaver to talk about the design and development of learning experiences? The purpose of the metaphor is to situate the role of the designer of learning experiences as the one responsible for identifying what is expected and for using the appropriate tools to connect the threads, whatever their characteristics or attributes. In the end, learning, like the weave in this metaphor, is a multidimensional socio-cultural artefact.

Diverse expectations related to the pedagogical advisor role

According to Patiño and Martínez Cantú (2019), there is no single job description of learning design nor a single set of activities for those who design learning experiences. The naming and configuration of the role can change according to the type of HEI and its processes. Sometimes the role implies acting as a consultant for decision-making at various levels; in other cases, it means operating as a technician who takes on specific tasks or products to support the teachers. In a different context, it may mean being in charge of receiving inputs to transform them into a learning experience, with or without the SEM; and in other contexts, it may require that one is a coach and trainer to transform teachers' practices. I refer to people in these roles collectively as pedagogical advisors, without forgetting that knowledge in other fields, such as technology or multimedia, is necessary.

Is the role of a pedagogical advisor given to a recipient? Who determines who is a pedagogical advisor? The role can change not only from one institution to another, but also from one project to another inside one institution. Hence, an essential skill of the pedagogical advisor is to analyse the context and the participants to identify the conditions and expectations and thus establish their role. This is a necessary first task in any project and involves understanding the institutional framework and its determinants, as well as the team of teachers and SMEs, their interests and expectations. Sometimes this is defined at the outset (for example, contractually), but sometimes it is only during the initial framing and meetings with the team that this can be brought to light.

This explicit approach to framing the work of the pedagogical advisor seeks to reduce potential tensions that may arise in teamwork, depending on the expectations that each one has of the other’s role. The expectations of the teachers or SEMs determine, to an extent, the definition of roles, work dynamics and the learning experiences achieved. For example, the advisor may have the expectation that the teachers will take their suggestions as instructions and will implement them; the institution may expect the pedagogical advisor to guarantee the application of his/her learning design principles in the development of teaching and learning artefacts; the teacher may have the expectation that the pedagogical advisor will build educational resources, activities or concrete instructions according to their needs. Clarity from the team about everyone’s expectations from the outset will allow for fluidity and alignment with each other.

Patiño and Martínez Cantú (2019) found in a study on instructional design in online courses in HEIs that one of the tensions that arise between teaching teams and instructional designers relates to instructional designers offering pedagogic advice to teaching staff. In my own experience, I have observed that some university teachers have felt that when they are given pedagogical guidance or suggestions, their knowledge is being questioned and their experience is being ignored, which can cause that rejection. This situation may be the result of assuming that there is only one correct way of teaching or learning without finding a way to accommodate both approaches. In such cases, it is quite possible that the teacher’s expertise and the advisor’s training and experience can be brought into alignment. In addition to clarifying the context and roles, the pedagogical advisor requires the ability to relate to other frames of reference different from their own, which may be rooted in the disciplinary conventions of different courses and to negotiate with teaching staff in pursuit of better learning experiences for students.

In addition, as mentioned in the section on the institutional thread, certain institutions have an interest in the ongoing training of their teachers and in the transformation of teaching practices within the framework of their own plans and existing national regulations. In these cases, the role of the pedagogical advisor may be oriented toward supporting teachers by training them. Therefore, the pedagogical advisor must also be able to facilitate reflection in others, fostering dialogical scenarios that allow them to observe themselves, question themselves and make decisions aimed at improvement. Thus, the aim is to accompany the teachers in their reflection, in the hope that they can be aware of what they know and what they need to learn.

Scholars refer to the stages of development of mastery, showing that one goes from the extreme of not knowing what one does not know to becoming so expert that one does not know everything one knows (Ambrose et al., 2010). This reference is pertinent in this case, as it is possible that teachers have very high levels of technical and disciplinary mastery, which sometimes distances them from knowing how to unravel the detail necessary to guide the route of others toward that level of mastery. Also, from a pedagogical perspective, there are good teachers who are not able to explain what they do for their students' learning. It is also possible that they have never reflected on these issues. There are also many teachers who need to further develop their pedagogical skills.

Developing pedagogical skills can be a personal interest, where teachers have personal motivation; or an institutional interest, where it is the organisation that wants teachers to develop these dimensions; or both, as an ideal scenario, where the teacher has the motivation and the institution offers the tools. In such a scenario, a challenge for the pedagogic advisor, referred to by Wasson and Kirschner as a learning designer, is to empower teachers as designers (2020). What does that mean? It means that advisors are not only collaborating with teachers to develop a learning experience, but they are working with formative intentions so that the teacher is able to apply what they are learning to design new learning experiences. The project can be a way to develop skills that the teachers can apply in future projects in which they may not have support. It is therefore important that another skill of the pedagogical advisor is the ability to guide and give effective feedback.

What is the best way to provide advice? As expected, there is no single correct approach. Accurate reading of the context, expectations and needs allows advisors to select appropriate methods, techniques and tools. This is another necessary skill. At this point, I am not talking about methodologies for teaching and learning the experience that is being designed, but those required to work with teaching teams. In our guiding metaphor, this corresponds to selecting the right needle to achieve the desired texture of the fabric. It is pertinent to clarify that the skills of the pedagogical advisor that are of interest in this context are not oriented towards their ability to promote student learning, the central purpose of their role, but rather to achieve the necessary process to build the artefacts and experiences that make learning possible. Undoubtedly, there are other more specific skills required by the educational advisor, such as establishing learning outcomes, designing assessment strategies and digital educational resources according to these, and applying learning techniques according to specific needs, among others (Klein & Jun, 2014; cited in Patiño & Martínez Cantú, 2019).

As a corollary, I would like to emphasise, perhaps repeat, that the advisors must be prepared to adapt and work in heterogeneous scenarios, and in them clearly establish their role. Let us return for a moment to the metaphor that guides this text. Its main purpose is to invite us to think that learning experiences are unique, almost artisanal, and depend to a great extent on the raw material from which they are made. Whatever the conditions are, there is a wonderful opportunity in the exercise of the pedagogical advisor, and it is to contribute to the quality of education and training wherever it takes place. If the scenario enables the advisor to participate in the transformation of teaching practice, there is a double impact, first contributing to the teachers and their future practice, and second, to the students who will participate in the learning experiences achieved.

Conclusion

The threads with which the design of learning experiences is woven are multiple and diverse, requiring differential and specific treatments. Not all techniques work in all cases, not all tools are tailor-made, and not all existing theories apply to them. Understanding what you are weaving, allows you to know whether to choose a needle or a loom and to do so decisively.

With the growth of online education, there is a fear that the design of learning experiences is becoming increasingly industrialised and that education is growing as an industry that sells products and experiences. This can mean that specific educational contexts are not considered and that the people who make up the teams that work in them are not considered adequately. It demands, as in many productive industries, shorter timelines, standardised tools and lower costs. We face the challenge of finding a balance between this growth in the scope of education, which is necessary to reduce socioeconomic gaps and barriers, and maintaining the meaning and background of the quality educational experience; which, although not necessarily handcrafted, has something of this in its essence. But make no mistake, this is not a condition of online education, it is not a characteristic of the modality; it corresponds more to political and strategic decisions of HEIs.

I have not wanted to talk here about the technical depth of what comprises the design of learning experiences, but about the surface, in a certain sense. In Colombian universities, we are working to gather the lessons learned, appropriate frameworks and recognise trends in various parts of the world. We have the great challenge of continuing to build our own ways of doing things that allow us to respond appropriately to our own social needs.

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