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Christopher Douce

Introducing ICEBERG

Sunday 17 August 2025 at 21:06
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On 11 July 25, in my capacity as a TM113 module team member, I attended a continuing professional development (CPD) event about something called ICEBERG.

ICEBERG is an abbreviation for Integrated, Collaborative, Engaging, Balanced, Economical, Reflective and Gradual. It is a tool used during learning and curriculum design, and is intended to embody best practice. The session was facilitated by learning designer Paul Astles, who is from the OU unit Learner and Discovery Services (LDS) (I think that is what LDS means).

What follows is a set of notes, which I am sharing with permission. It is hoped they are useful to anyone who is involved in learning design (including my colleagues from TM113 module team). My advance apologies are for anything obvious that I have missed, any mistakes I have included, and how long it has taken to pull together this set of notes. I always endeavour to thoroughly offer citations, but some sentences may have been taken verbatim from a useful presentation that Paul shared during his session.

Considering draft materials

The starting point of the session was also our starting point; our first drafts of our module materials, which are known as a ‘D0’ (or, module materials that we have started to sketch out). To help up think about our D0s, we looked at 3 ICEBERG principles: Integrated, Collaborative, and Engaging. Each principles have a set of ‘corresponding design tips’. Here are the tips that I’ve noted down, which come from Van Ameijde et al. (2018):

  • Integrated: A well-integrated curriculum constitutes a coherent whole where all the parts work together in a meaningful and cohesive way. This means that there is constructive alignment between learning outcomes, assessments, activities and support materials which all contribute effectively to helping students to pass the module.
  • Collaborative: Meaningful student collaboration and communication helps students in engaging in deep learning and making concepts and ideas their own (e.g., Garrison et al., 2001; Johnson & Johnson, 1999). It also serves as a mechanism for social support where students feel part of an active academic community of learners (see Tinto, 1975) which makes it more likely that they are retained.
  • Engaging: An engaging curriculum draws students in and keeps them interested, challenged and enthusiastic about their learning journey. Where the curriculum matches student interests and aligns with their educational and career aspirations, students are more likely to be retained. Using relevant case studies and readings and keeping these up-to-date as well as including a variety of different types of activities contribute to an engaging curriculum.

We were asked to look at a bit of material that was content heavy and were asked a question: how do we relate our draft materials to these points on the framework?

During our discussions, I made a couple of notes. Regarding Integrative, scene setting is important, since it adds concept. Collaborative can be useful, particularly a bit later on in the module when tools are introduced (collaboration is really important skill within software engineering). Also, Engaging can and should directly align with educational and career aspirations.

A key point that I took away from this part of the session was the need to emphasise ‘the people bit’. Also, since TM113 has three key themes, a question I had was ‘how do we integrate them together?’ There are also, of course, other important themes that are important to the module, such as employability, skills development, ethics and sustainability. In some respects, software engineering can be a linking theme, since it is all about people, tools, management of complexity, and communication.

The student learning journey

After a short break, the next part of the session related to the ‘student learning journey’. We again returned to the definitions of Van Ameijde et al. (2018):

  • Balanced: Balanced in this context refers to the workload that students face when studying the curriculum and the extent that this workload is well-paced and evenly distributed. Research has pointed out a negative correlation between average weekly workload and student outcomes, including satisfaction and pass rates, making it particularly important that we don’t overload students whilst keeping the workload appropriate for the level of study.
  • Economical: Economical refers to the extent to which a module or qualification is efficient in delivering the learning outcomes without providing too much additional material which. There might be a temptation to provide students with an overwhelming array of interesting facts, ideas, theories and concepts in a given subject area.
  • Reflective: For students to effectively pass a module and engage in deep learning, it is important that they are able to reflect on their learning and study progress and have the time and space to do so. This includes regular opportunities for students to test their understanding through, for instance, self-assessment questions, formative quizzes and iCMAs. It also includes opportunities for students to reflect on their learning practices and progress, and set goals. Such opportunities for reflection and feedback help keep students engaged with the curriculum and makes retention more likely.

Of these three principles, one of them is causing me a mild amount of worry: the ‘economical’ principal. There is an inherent challenge within pedagogy, which is: to learn some higher level concepts, you may need to learn a lot of lower level concepts. This learning of ‘lots of useful stuff’ can be difficult. There is also an important related question, which is: where do tell students about all these lower level concepts, if we’re being asked to do it in a cognitively economically way? Interesting facts, ideas and theories can be useful.

We didn’t get the chance to have a chat about ‘G’, which is Gradual. Also drawing on Van Ameijde et al. (2018):

  • Gradual: In an effective learning journey, students will gradually encounter increasingly complex and challenging concepts, ideas, materials, tasks and skills development. Where knowledge, skills and assessments all occur over a manageable gradient which builds on acquired knowledge, provides timely opportunities to learn and practice study skills and prepares them achieving the defined learning outcomes, it is more likely that students will not be overwhelmed and therefore more likely be retained.

The key point that I’ve taken away from this bit is the importance of practice (relevant ‘student answered questions’ which can be presented in the module materials)

Resources

During this session (and a related session) links to a number of useful resources were shared. These include:

And, of course, the article that was mentioned earlier:

Reflections

During this session, we didn’t have much time to apply the framework to our module materials, since we still had much to figure out. Not only were we still figuring out ICEBERG, we were also still figuring out the nature and form of our module materials.

One question I did have of ICEBERG was: where is the tutor in all this? I think the answer is that the tutor is implicitly embedded within all parts of the framework. Tutors, of course, make module materials come alive. In turn, they can magnify whatever learning design decisions have been made by the module team.

I get the impression that ICEBERG is a tool that specifically applies to individual modules, rather than qualifications – or, in other words, groups of modules. Can ICEBERG be applied to qualifications?  Referring to the original article by Van Ameijde et al., the definition of economical ‘refers to the extent to which a course or qualification is efficient in delivering the learning outcomes’ which suggest that it may well have a wider role. An interesting research question could be: ‘how might all the principles of ICEBERG be used to analyse the learning design of qualifications from different faculties?’ In the meantime, I’m going to concentrate on TM113.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Paul for his useful presentation, LDS, and all colleagues who have contributed to the development of ICEBERG. Thanks are also extended to fellow TM113 colleagues who attended the session.

Tags: learning design, Learning Design, LD, TM113, ICEBERG, LDS
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Christopher Douce

User generated mobile learning designs

Tuesday 18 November 2008 at 09:07
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Edited by Christopher Douce, Sunday 17 August 2025 at 21:12

Would I be considered to be weird if I said that I quite like exams? I admit, I do quite like the challenge, but more specifically, I also like the feeling of opening a paper and knowing (roughly) how to answer the questions I find, and making a choice about which questions I'm going to answer, and which ones I'm going to ignore (if I have a choice, of course). I also like receiving the result and relaxing when a course finishes!

A big question to ask in relation to taking exams is, 'how do you successfully transfer all the knowledge and understanding from your course into your head in such a form that you can answer potentially challenging (and interesting!) questions?' We all have our own unique set of strategies. I'll share some of mine.

Repurposing material

When I'm taking a course, one of the things that I do is make voluminous notes. I am a sucker for writing things down. I buy a couple of dividers and split a A4 (or a lever arch) file into sections corresponding to the blocks. I usually have a couple of extra dividers free for 'other stuff'.

I admit that I sometimes go a bit far, especially when I insist on choosing a single brand of pen for the whole set of notes that I make during a course. I make headings in a consistent style and sometimes experiment with underlining colours!

Although this might seem to be a bit unusual (in terms of my studying rituals), the activity of taking notes is central to my studying strategy. Once I have my notes and the exam date is looming, I sometimes re-write my notes. I take my sides of A4 and 'summarise them down' to a single side of A4, trusting that the stuff that is not on the page is faithfully held within my head.

In the e-learning world, the term 'repurposing' crops up from time to time. It means to take existing materials that have been designed for one purpose and to change them in some way so they can be used for something else. One of the difficulties of e-learning content repositories is that it is difficult to repurpose or reuse existing learning materials, perhaps because of the granularity of the material, or perhaps because that some material is too closely connected to a particular learning situation (or context). But I digress…

When working towards an exam, I actively 'repurpose' the contents of the course that I am studying. I take the course and transfer themes and ideas from the text books or the course materials and transfer them into my A4 file.

Learning pathways

The A4 file represents my own unique adventure or path through a set of learning resources, replete with questions to self, underlining, quotations and green underlining. My repurposing activity, as an active learner, is a construction activity. In essence, I have designed my own learning resources, or have designed my own learning.

When I was a student on The Challenge of the Social Sciences, I have to confess I was not looking forward to the exam. What helped me, was not only the excellent resources that the course team provided, but also the mind maps, sets of notes and other forms of crib sheets that my fellow students had posted selflessly to our on-line discussion forum. They were a great help, not only in seeing that others were revising as hard as I was, but they were also pointing out and bringing different parts of the course together in ways that I had previously missed. Guys, I owe you one!

Dead time

I often travel on a train. When studying, I try to read when I am travelling, which I find difficult. One of the reasons, other than that I cannot easily take notes because the train is bumping around (!), is that I'm often sitting next to someone who is insisting on talking loudly on their mobile phone the moment I wish to try to settle down to learn something about the history of empiricism. Not to mention the lack of 'elbow room' needed to work through ones course notes.

I much prefer listening to podcasts. Listening is another one of my learning preferences. If only I could easily convert my notes into audio form, I might be able to make better use of the 'dead time' I spend on a train.

One thing I could try to do (but I shall never dare!) is to make a podcast of my own notes. This does sound a bit extreme since I am lead to believe that making a podcast takes up lots of time, not to mention equipment. 

You need to learn how to use your sound recording software, you might even start with a script, then there is a period of editing (podediting?) to edit out the false starts, door bell ringing, the dog or telephone… 

This makes me wonder: is there a way to repurpose textual notes, interesting quotations, chapter headings and thematic points in such a way that you can create an interactive audio file that contains pathways that you could navigate through whilst your travel?

iLearningNotes

Not so long ago I learnt about the Daisy talking book project and was struck by the quality of the speech synthesisers that could be used (some of the same synthesisers are also used by the current generation of screen readers).

Imagine a tool, not unlike Compendium, where you could build audio mind maps. Underneath headings you could add notes and quotations. You could establish conceptual links between different titles, chapters and ideas. The graphical structures that you create could then be converted into speech using a high quality speech synthesiser.

Another possibility could be that you might be able to use excerpts from other podcasts. Of course, there may be nothing stopping you making your own recordings, perhaps combining your material with words from other sources (providing you adhere to licence conditions, of course).

When you have finished editing you could transfer your edited interactive 'audio map' (which may even have corresponding iconic pictures!) to a magic mobile device not unlike an iPod. You could use the magic wheel control to move through the chapters, sections and notes that you have 'built'. You may also be able to control the rate of playback, allowing you to skip over sections of which you become more familiar.

When you have created your audio notes, in true Web 2.0 fashion you could share your own personal course specific pathways with others. You might be even able to repurpose or modify pathways created by other people so they closely match your own individual learning needs. Furthermore, these resulting navigable audio equivalents may have the potential to be useful for people with disabilities.

Back to learning design

There are some resonances between these ideas and the area of learning design tools and systems.

I first came across the concept of learning design when looking through the IMS specifications. I soon learnt that IMS LD was an XML language that could be used to construct descriptions of learning activities that could be executed using a player. I later came across a system called LAMS, and most recently was told about something called the e-lesson mark-up language, ELML.

Learning design, as an idea, can take many forms. The different systems vary in terms of dynamic adaptability, ease of authoring and who the language or system is intended for. Another is presented by CloudWorks, from what I understand.

My designs

When I study, I design my own learning with help from the materials that I am provided. This may occur when I travel on a train, carry out internet searches on the internet, or read some notes whilst drinking a cup of tea at home.

My own personal pathway through a set of resources may be very different to the pathway that other learners may choose. Learning about the differences, potentially through mobile devices, may help me (and fellow learners) to see new sets of connections that were not immediately understandable.

In doing so, we have the potential to create devices and tools that make better use of our 'dead time'.

Tags: mobile learning, podcasting, accessibility, user generated content, learning design, Learning Design
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