Due to neoliberal ideologies, NPM, accountability systems, and market-oriented management of the public sector, there has been a political effort over the past decades to rationalise and streamline education; for example by making standards and formats for education and teaching courses in higher education. This has happened as part of a global competition for the best possible educational output for the least money possible (Biesta et al., 2015, 2011; Green, 2010; Mausethagen & Smeby, 2016). This international development has also taken place in the Danish education system, including University Colleges. Wanting to reduce costs is by no means new, nor that teachers share each other’s teaching plans in less formalised forms, but it might prove problematic when and if instructional/learning designs are formalised to a high degree and become standards rather than being created on a more voluntary basis and made flexible in relation to reusing.

Within a Nordic didactic tradition, teacher autonomy is given a very high value, and therefore there is reason to warn against the idea that teaching can be produced in packages that others can open and use directly in new contexts. On the other hand, there is also reason to address potential bias within learning designs. For example, that reusing learning designs is always a straitjacket, which requires that the design must be performed as it, is without the possibility of modification and context adaptation.

This paper draws on two completed research projects and one ongoing project in which we have taken a critical, but constructive view of learning designs. Our research interest has been to uncover the possibilities of utilising a design’s resources in the form of qualified pedagogical ideas and reflections on the part of the designers, but at the same time preserve a pedagogical space with the teachers who stand as those who have to use the design. This is a fundamental dilemma. On the one hand, a design must appear pedagogically well-crafted and with well-communicated pedagogical instructions so that the designers’ competence can benefit the reusers. On the other hand, the design must not be too restrictive and dictating as this leaves no room for the reusing teachers’ pedagogical adaptation of the design to their own teaching context. Therefore, it is all about finding a balance. The question that we investigate in this paper is therefore: Which factors determine the extent to which a pedagogical space for the reuse of learning designs is achieved?

We have constructed the theoretical framework with a background in literature studies. This has shown that in the research field of learning designs there has been limited attention to the problems that arise when teachers other than the designers have to take over the design, make sense of it and bring it to life. Our theoretical framework combines different traditions. The concept of ‘context sensitivity’ has been an important premise for our approach to learning design as our starting point is that no two contexts are ever exactly the same. Teaching is first and foremost an interpersonal and situated practice that cannot be anticipated as such but unfolds in the meeting between the teacher and the student about a content (Oettingen, 2010). This requires a degree of autonomy and that the teacher can act as a reflective practitioner who makes professional judgements (Wackerhausen, 2008; Hedegaard & Krogh-Jespersen 2011). It is therefore always necessary to some extent to translate a design before it can be used in another context. Therefore, our analyses also include concepts of knowledge transfer and translation with inspiration, partly from actor network theory (ANT) (Callon, 1984; Latour, 1996) and partly Scandinavian institutionalism (Røvik, 2016).

Based on our presumptions on existing literature in the field and on the theoretical considerations, we selected a number of empirical cases and examined these. The core of the empirical research design is therefore a multiple case study comprising five very different cases from the same UC institution. Each case is represented by a learning design. In the selection, we focused on as many variations as possible in relation to a number of different parameters. The case study has primarily been based on hermeneutic epistemology. It has been a strategy for empirical exploration of a selected contemporary phenomenon in its natural context using various data sources (Robertson, Neves de Azevedo & Dale, 2016; Robson & Yin in Ramian, 2012). The specific empirical methods used were: • Document analyses of important texts that formed the basis of the learning designs, both analogue and digital. • Individual and group interviews with key informants involved in format development, sharing and reuse. • Observations from meetings, teaching, etc., where formats were discussed or tested. When studying the cases, our focus was on the three processes: Developing, sharing and reusing. Initially, the analyses were data-driven, but later they were supplemented by more concept-driven interpretations of the cases, which have further qualified the analytical gaze that eventually was enacted to answer the research questions. We first analysed the individual design cases in their own context where the use of different data sources enabled data triangulation. From the individual case analyses, we expanded the analysis with theoretical generalisation, which contributed to challenging and developing the preconceptions and theories that preceded the research. This led us to develop two key concepts to understand what is essential to a learning design’s pedagogical space. These key concepts, which we elaborate on below, were later tested in another project named ‘Students’ Academic Digital Competences’ (STAK) as analytic tools to identify and uncover pedagogical spaces in a number of learning designs (Frederiksen et al., 2021). On the basis of these experiences, we have further developed and refined the concepts.

The two key concepts developed for the analysis of pedagogical space in learning designs we called ‘explanation’ and ‘regulation’. The former addresses how thoroughly and detailed the design is described, elaborated and argued for, while the latter deals with how strongly bound/inflexible the design is. This aspect has two sides in that inflexibility can be due to the internal cohesiveness of teaching/learning elements, or that the granularity of the elements is coarse (Wiley, 2000). The inflexibility can also depend on the extent to which the design is granted authority, for example by ‘external’ power from a management body. We argue that both explanation and regulation represent continua, where explanation can range between simple and comprehensive, and regulation can range between weak and strong. The empirical cases have shown that the two concepts can vary independently of each other, whereby four modalities for educational space emerge. Simple explanation combined with weak regulation initiates a large educational space, but on the other hand, it requires the reuser to add further elements to the design. On the contrary, comprehensive explanation and strong regulation initiate a very small pedagogical space as even the smallest elements are required to be carried out. We believe that the combination of ‘explanation’ and ‘regulation’ as a pair of concepts adds new and important aspects to design research. It is innovative that we have combined a number of dimensions, the discursive and content dimension represented by ‘explanation’ and the power dimension represented by ‘regulation’ as what frames pedagogical spaces in learning designs. As a theoretical model with its four modalities, it is a powerful tool to analyse learning design processes. It can show potentials as well as constraints in achieving an appropriate pedagogical space.

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