Lessons from the Deep: Designing Learning Ecosystems - week 1

Despite the lack of sunlight, immense pressure and scarce resources, life has found a way to flourish.

In the deep, organisms have adapted to conditions completely different from those we live in on the surface. They’ve developed structures and systems that enable them to survive — and even thrive — in cold, dark, high-pressure environments. Instead of relying on the sun for heat and light, they optimise internal systems and harness thermal vents. Even more telling is that if they tried to imitate the most successful species in a rainforest, they’d be crushed and frozen at the bottom of the sea. So instead, creatures from the deep do not imitate their compadres from the rainforest; they make the most of the constraints in their own contexts.

Many learning environments operate in similar conditions. You can probably picture the scene – connectivity is unreliable; staff are overstretched; digital confidence… what’s that again? Infrastructure is under pressure. Teams can barely see each other through mountains of paperwork and looming deadlines.

In these digital depths, institutions often place all their hope on an LMS to fix the darkness, the pressure and the isolation. They install learning systems designed for abundance into environments defined by constraint. Then, when there is no shiny, high-bandwidth, generously funded support teams or oodles of continuous development time, things fall apart.

Sadly, we’ve seen it all too often. When platform design ignores environmental reality, the outcome is predictable: either a crushing defeat as the LMS collapses under pressure, or an underused, frustration-inducing system that is eventually abandoned.

What we’ve come to realise is that the issue is rarely the technology itself.  More often than not, it is ecological misalignment.

If we want sustainable learning ecosystems, we must begin with environmental diagnosis. We need to understand the real constraints. Where will energy and resources come from to sustain momentum? Who will support and govern the system once it is live? And critically, what internal capabilities must be developed so the ecosystem can thrive where it actually exists?

Nothing exists in isolation from the harsh deep-sea environment. Form is shaped by pressure, energy and constraint. In constrained environments, precision matters more than scale. Governance matters more than features. Competence matters more than complexity.

In the deep, we also see that pressure is not an obstacle. It is the shaping force. Without that pressure, those organisms would not exist as they do. Their form and structure are answers to their environment.

Perhaps then, the real question is not how to remove constraint, but how to design systems that are shaped intelligently by it. After all, as the deep sea teaches us, sustainable systems are shaped by context, not by imitation.

By Dr Isabel Tarling