About
Every design decision begins with the pedagogy. Retrieval, spacing and scaffolding that fades as skills grow are where a product starts. They are not features bolted on at the end.
I have always liked efficient systems. As a child I tried to persuade mum and dad to rebuild the house so that it made more sense. Now it means one record that every interaction feeds, nothing typed twice, and no hours lost to tools that don't talk to each other.
Learning analytics should show what learners actually do and compare each one with their own past. That gives educators actionable insights and an outside check on their own judgement, with a human always in the loop.
Real problems are complex, so the thinking underneath has to be thorough. What people see should not be. In my classroom, the whole behaviour policy was one question:
“Was it necessary?”
Bad design is paid for by the people who live with it.
For example, walk through a badly planned town and you can see it: the people there deal with someone else's lack of thought every day, and it was avoidable. Learning tools are no different.
Education, good design and careful thinking can each change lives.Together, they can improve almost anything.
I learned this running my own academy in Spain, after eight years of teaching English.
Planning and admin swallowed my week, so I designed and built the system I needed. It is now growing into FeedForward Learning, a learning ecosystem for schools, academies and workplace training.
Joe Allport