Hi Barb, one of the issues we faces when we started out was there seemed to be lots of designs which tried to second guess what might be good for learners, and lots of research which asked learners what their learning experience was like ...
But none of this (as far as we could see ...) treated the process as a dynamic, adaptive, changing process - it was generally treated as a single event - one experience.
Our research and interviews with learners (in our NLC papers some time back) seemed to be telling us something quite different - that learning experience, and strategy, and response, and style could all change substantially during a learning event. So we tried to find a way to describe that - as learners, as designers, as teachers, as researchers.
What this yields is a series of snapshots of learning by a range of people, at a range of times. Not the kind of convenient 'big data' that you can enter into a computer and ask it to do the thinking for you - its messy stuff that you have to engage with - preferably by engaging with the footprints (and showing your own, messy ones too) and with the people concerned. Its a big-mulit-triangulation process, not a convenient bid-data process. (Aside: convenient data is like convenience food - very tempting, but not necessarily good for you or sustainable).
So ... maybe no 'one' decides what's good for your or 'them' - you ask yourself and everyone else to describe their experience/s, and then compare notes, have a conversation, and see what comes out of it.
mmmmm.... does that i) make sense and ii) appeal to you?
If not ... well, you might not have come to the right webinar!