Toward a Technological Theory of Learning Experience Design: New Learning Science Colliding with Artificial Intelligence
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Learning experience design (LXD) has reached a crisis point. Two powerful revolutions are colliding: artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming what learning technologies can do, while advances in neuroscience and cognitive science are reshaping what we understand learning itself to be. Generative and conversational systems can now respond, adapt, explain, simulate, and interact in ways that earlier instructional technologies could not. Research on prospection, prediction, memory, emotion, and social cognition is portraying learning in a new way as increasingly dynamic, forward-looking, and affectively charged. The problem is the lack of an adequate technological theory for bridging the gap between these two developments. Scientific theories explain learning, and intelligent technologies supply unprecedented capabilities, but neither by itself tells designers how adaptive learning experiences should be structured, governed, and realized in this new regime. This paper proposes a technological theory of learning experience design intended to bridge that widening gap. It proposes conversation as the fundamental structural form of learning interaction. The resulting framework positions AI not as an autonomous instructional authority but as a designed participant operating within humanly defined purposes and constraints. The collision of new learning science and new intelligent technology therefore represents not merely another technological change, but a turning point in the theory and practice of learning experience design.
Source: Research Square
Author: Andrew S. Gibbons
Institution: Brigham Young University
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225142932