Discipline-based designs for learning: The example of professional and vocational education

Designs for learning for professional and vocational education are often rich and deeply contextualized in specific forms of practice yet they often remain unseen and unknown outside their particular contexts of use. This chapter exemplifies how learning designs have developed to promote the principles of the teaching of a particular subject domain. Professional and vocational education is dominated by teaching and assessing practice-based knowledge, designing for complex integrated curricula and the influence of external requirements. This chapter considers a range of exemplars and discusses the implications for design in the context of the new educational paradigms associated with e-learning.