8.1 Learning design and open source teaching  (Page 13/18)

So, I know that you have spent a lot of time not only working on Learning Design, but taking a real leadership role shaping the dialog globally, have you found US educators less receptive or understanding of Learning Design than educators elsewhere? I don’t want to make this into a US thing, but I would imagine that there are characteristics associated with different educational systems that would bias toward certain types of practice and adoption of certain types of software.

10. james dalziel - may 23rd, 2007 at 8:08 am

Ken, Let me take your two main questions (standards for learning design, and reasons for slow US adoption) in separate posts. In terms of open standards, the IMS Learning Design specification is the main reference point for this area. There is quite a history to this specification which I won’t go into here, but for a brief discussion of issues from a LAMS perspective, see this article

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Suffice to say that open standards for Learning Design are a very important goal, and the ability to take a Learning Design created on one system and play it (with fidelity) on another is something worth striving for.

Unfortunately, the concept of Learning Design, as well as its implementation in the IMS LD specification, is quite complex, and I believe we are only at the beginning of many years of innovation and development. As a result, any Learning Design specification will need to evolve with new ideas and feedback from practice.

One of the areas that we have worked hard on in LAMS is how individual activity tools plug into a Learning Design system (ie, the core workflow engine of the run-time part of a Learning Design system) in such a way that it creates a well integrated and easy to use Learning Design application. This integration is described in the LAMS “Tools Contract” - for a technical discussion of this, see

(External Link)

In essence, each activity tool (eg, Forum, Chat, Quiz, etc) needs to present four interfaces that follow certain behavioural conventions: Author, Monitor, Learner and Admin. These interfaces describe how an activity tool plugs into the main system, including authentication and roles (Admin), what interface it provides for authoring/configuration of itself (Authoring); the actual activity tool accessed by learners at the relevant step within a Learning Design when it is run (Learner); and how a teacher who is overseeing a running activity can view student tasks and intervene if required (Monitor).

So in addition to an ideal Learning Design standard that describes the structure and flow of activities (IMS LD is a first step in this direction), we also see an important role for a description of how activity tools run within a run-time system. These tool descriptions are a mixture of data element (eg, the thread for this forum discussion is “XXX”) and behavioural elements (eg, this forum tool should restrict students to posting a maximum of two responses to this forum, of no more than 1000 characters each, and students cannot start new threads). So in an ideal Learning Design standard, we’ll need to come up with an agreed set of core data and behaviour elements for each type of activity tool, so that when I move my description of how to instantiate a forum from one system to a second system, the second system can recreate a functionally equivalent forum experience (regardless of the fact that it has its own different forum tool).