Learning Experience Design Cards
UIT Digital Learning Technologies
Are you ready to design a course that will engage, captivate, and delight your students?
The process of designing a course can quickly become complicated, draining educators of the excitement and energy that is needed in design efforts. Learning Experience Design (LXD) Cards are here to help!
Use these cards to discover active learning approaches that align with your course goals and inspire new ways to engage with your students.
These cards were created by the Digital Learning Experience team at the University of Utah because we have a passion for teaching and learning. We hope that the process of playing with the LXD Cards inspires creativity and engagement in your teaching. Happy learning!
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The cards
The deck includes three types of LXD Cards: Goal, Type of Learning, and Activity.
These can be used and played with in different orders to help craft engaging learning
experiences for students.
Goal Cards
In each deck there are five identical Goal Cards.
These provide a space for you to write your course goals on sticky notes (one per
card) and have a continual reference as you plan activities and identify learning
types that support those goals.
Goal Cards can also be filled in after you identify learning types and activities.
Types of Learning Cards
Created combining the learning outcomes from Bloom’s Taxonomy and Fink’s taxonomy
with the intention to marry the strengths of the two. Types of Learning Cards are
initially sorted alphabetically to avoid creating a hierarchy and encourage equal
exploration of each type.
Each card has a unique color and specific icon for quick reference. The color codes are also shown on the Activities Card for suggested alignment between the Type of Learning and supporting activities.
Each type of Learning Card has a list of verbs that can be used to describe the types of engagement. These can be used to directly craft course goals, assignment descriptions, and desired outcomes.
Activity Cards
There are 40 Activity Cards in each deck that make up a pool of teaching and learning strategies used in classes. They are used for facilitating active learning both during class time and independently. Some of the activities include: collaborative inquiry, group discussion, research project, and simulation.
With a rich pool of learning activities and resources to pull from, instructors are
more able to craft structured, engaging learning experiences for their students.
Each Activity Card has colored dots along the top edge that correlate with a corresponding Learning Type. The Learning Type is then reinforced below for a quick reference. This allows instructors to quickly look through the Activity Cards to identify whether the Activity supports their desired Learning Type and visually organize activities for their course.
How to use the cards
A participant in a LXD workshop sorts Activity Cards according to the Learning Type (indicated by the color at the top of the card) as a way to better understand their options for activities. They then moved on to understanding Learning Types, and chose to set goals for the course based on their exploration.
Scholarly work on LXD Cards:
- Li, Q., Paskett, C., & Johnson, H. (2022). The UofU Learning Experience Design (LXD) Cards. Presentation at Virtual UPCEA2022 Annual Conference REACH, Online, May 3rd, 2022.
- Li, Q., Thomas, J., & Johnson, H. (2020). Professor, Tell Us A Story. Presentation at OLC Innovate 2020, Online, June 25th, 2020.
- Li, Q., Johnson, H.K. & Thomas, J. (2020). Developing online courses with course design cards. The Teaching Professor.
- Li, Q. & Thomas, J. (2019). Instructional Design, the Card Game. Presentation at OLC Innovate 2019, Denver, Colorado, April 4th, 2019.