Video lesson: Designing Topics and Units in the BDP Tool

In this video, we demonstrate how to structure teaching and learning topics and units in the Balanced Design Planning (BDP) tool. A similar approach can be used when planning activities in spreadsheet or other suitable tools. My name is Blaženka Divjak, and I am a professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Organization and Informatics, as well as the head of the Laboratory for Learning Analytics, where we developed this learning design tool together with our partners. In the video, I show examples from some of my courses developed over the past several years and demonstrate how to open and structure topics and units within a course, using “Research and Development Project Cycle” as an example. The course includes a short description, selected descriptors such as its level (postgraduate doctoral study) and ECTS value, and a list of learning outcomes whose weights sum to 100, indicating their relative importance within the course. The planning structure consists of topics as the largest units (such as R&D projects and EU funds), within which there are units like Prepare, Engage, and Extend, and within each unit, specific teaching and learning activities, such as introductory readings. When creating a new topic, it is important to ensure that it covers at least one learning outcome by assigning relevant outcomes to the topic, showing how strongly each outcome is addressed. Within each topic, new units can be added with names and descriptions, often aligned with specific pedagogical approaches such as the flipped classroom or project-based learning. During the planning phase, the tool allows us to check alignment with targeted ECTS workload, ensure constructive alignment between learning outcomes and topics, and visualize coverage of learning outcomes across topics using tools such as heat maps and macro-level graphs. Thank you for watching.