The use of digital technologies is now widespread and increasing, but is not always optimized for effective learning. Teachers in higher education have little time or support to work on innovation and improvement of their teaching, which often means they simply replicate their current practice in a digital medium. This paper makes the case for a learning design support environment to support and scaffold teachers' engagement with and development of technology‐enhanced learning, based on user requirements and on pedagogic theory. To be able to adopt, adapt, and experiment with learning designs, teachers need a theory‐informed way of representing the critical characteristics of good pedagogy as they discover how to optimize learning technologies. This paper explains the design approach of the Learning Design Support Environment project, and how it aims to support teachers in achieving this goal.

The mounting wealth of open and readily available information and the accelerated evolution of social, mobile and creative technologies call for a re-conceptualisation of the role of educators: from providers of knowledge to designers of learning. This call is reverberated by the rising trend of research in learning design (LD). Addressing this, the Art and Science of Learning Design workshop brought together leading voices in the field, and provided a forum for discussing its key issues. It focused on three major themes: (1) practices, methods and methodologies, (2) tools and resources and (3) theoretical frameworks. This paper proposes a definition of LD, reviews the main contributions from the workshop, and suggests some challenges for future research.

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An increasing number of tools are available to support the learning design process at different levels and from different perspectives. However, this variety can make it difficult for researchers and teachers to assess the tool that is best suited to their objectives and contexts as learning designers. Several of the tools are presented elsewhere in this issue. In this article, the aforementioned tools are used as lenses to view the same learning design narrative Á an inquiry-based learning lesson on healthy eating aimed at secondary-school students Á from different perspectives, in a manner inspired by the plot structure of Kurosawa's film ''Rashomon''. In modelling the lesson on five tools, we uncovered similarities and differences in relation to the challenges posed by modelling a particular learning scenario, the ease of implementation of the computer-interpretable products' output by the tools and their different target audiences and pedagogical specialities. This comparative analysis thus illustrates some of the current underlying issues and challenges in the field of Learning Design.

This paper presents and compares a variety of approaches that have been developed to guide the decision-making process in learning design. Together with the companion Learning Design Rashomon II (Prieto et al., 2013), devoted to existing tools to support the same process, it aims to provide a view on relevant research results in this field. The common thread followed in these two contributions is inspired by Kurosawa's Rashomon film, which takes multiple perspectives on the same action. Similarly, in this paper, Rashomon I, a lesson on ''Healthy Eating'' is analysed according to five different approaches, while the Rashomon II paper is used to exemplify the affordances of different tools. For this reason, this paper does not follow the conventional structure of research papers (research question, method, results and discussion), but rather it moves from an introduction providing the rationale for the paper, to a description of the five different approaches to learning design (the 4SPPIces Model, the 4Ts, the e-Design Template, the Design Principles Database and the Design Narrative) and then to a discussion of their similarities and differences to inform the choice of potential users.Keywords: learning design approaches; pedagogical planning; inquiry learning Introduction Over the last 12 years, the research field of learning design has attracted the attention of many researchers because of its promise to provide powerful scaffolds for pedagogically informed design of learning activities that make effective use of technology. Consequently, the recent evolution of this field has been lively and dynamic, and researchers and practitioners have followed different paths to meet a common need: improving the quality and facilitating the implementation of technology-enhanced

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In this paper, we describe three key areas in the literature where sketching has been seen as being beneficial to designers. We applied this knowledge in the user interface design of a visualization system, conducting a qualitative study using sketching and design patterns. Our findings help to identify why sketching was useful in this context and we relate these to the literature on the efficacy of sketching in the design process.