Laurillard's Six Learning Types (ABC Learning Design)
A pedagogical taxonomy derived from the Conversational Framework that categorizes student learning activities into six distinct modes. It provides a practical, intuitive language for educators to map out the student journey and ensure a balanced mix of active and passive learning experiences.
When you need to design a complete learning experience from scratch
You're planning a workshop, training, or learning session and need a proven structure to organize your content and activities.
Ideal during the initial design or rapid redesign of a course, particularly when transitioning to blended or online formats or when seeking to diversify instructional methods.
Acquisition
Investigation
Practice
Discussion
Collaboration
Production
Ensures your session has clear goals, logical flow, and measurable outcomes.
Facilitators can use these types to storyboard a curriculum or session by mapping specific activities to each type, ensuring that the design moves beyond simple content delivery to include social and experiential elements.
- 1Start by defining what success looks like at the end
- 2Work backwards from outcomes to activities
- 3Build in checkpoints to verify learning
- 4Allow time for practice and application
- Blended learning design
- Curriculum storyboarding
- Digital transformation of teaching
- Collaborative course planning
- Pedagogical diversity over content delivery
- Student-centered activity mapping
- Alignment of technology tools with specific learning behaviors
- Collaborative design through a shared pedagogical language
- Acquisition (passive learning) is often over-represented in traditional design and should be balanced with active types
- The framework is designed to be accessible to non-experts without requiring deep knowledge of educational theory
- Effective implementation requires selecting the right tools (analog or digital) to support each specific learning type