Title: Video lesson: Designing Topics and Units in the BDP Tool
Course: Learning Design > Section: Student-centred design, learning and teaching activities, and assessment

Watch the detailed video tutorial that explains how to create teaching topics in the BDP tool and link them to the learning outcomes. This video will help you implement the learned concepts more clearly.

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One possible alternative to using the BDP tool is using the ABC tool, which includes almost the same learning types as BDP. However, keep in mind that this would only be feasible if the course were delivered in a blended format where participants complete some activities together in a physical setting. The reason is that the ABC tool has several limitations for implementation in an online environment: the tool available for collaborative online work is not fully adequate, it does not offer a Croatian-language interface, and it does not provide alignment checking features.

Additionally, it is possible to use Word/Excel formats to create a learning design based on general principles of learning design, but this is not recommended, given the importance of encouraging the use of free digital tools specifically designed for this purpose.

Watch the detailed video tutorial that explains how to create teaching and learning topics in the BDP tool and link them to the learning outcomes. This video will help you implement the learned concepts more clearly.

Transkript

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.

Possible alternative to using the BDP learning design tool is the ABC tool, which includes almost the same learning types as BDP.
However, it should be noted that ABC currently does not provide a complete tool for implementing learning design in an online environment and is not available in Croatian.

An alternative option is to use open-source or commercial text editing and spreadsheet tools (e.g., LibreOffice, Google Sheets, Word, Excel) to create a learning design based on general learning design principles.
However, this approach is not always recommended because it does not support collaborative work, automated analytics, or visualization of the learning design structure. The goal is to encourage the use of available free specialized digital tools.