Learning Design Tools Research Articles

Evaluating a new approach to learning design

Technologies, and in particular social and participatory media, provide rich opportunities to support a range of pedagogies and enable learners to communicate and collaborate with their peers. However, despite this technologies are not being used extensively. A new research theme, learning design, has emerged in recent years, which aims to address this gap between the potential and actual use of technologies. This paper argues that designing for learning is the key challenge faces education today. Practitioners need guidance on how to make informed design decisions about how to harness the characteristics of new technologies. Learning design tools and resource have been created that can both guide practitioners through the design process and enable them to make their designs explicit so that they can be shared and discussed. Learning design as a term has being used in a number of different ways, for the purposes of this paper it is defined as follows: A methodology for enabling teachers/designers to make more informed decisions in how they go about designing learning activities and interventions, which is pedagogically informed and makes effective use of appropriate resources and technologies. This includes the design of resources and individual learning activities right up to curriculum-level design. A key principle is to help make the design process more explicit and shareable. Learning design as an area of research and development includes both gathering empirical evidence to understand the design process, as well as the development of a range of resource, tools and activities. Learning design is distinct from, but related to other research areas, such as: instructional design, pedagogical patterns and Open Educational Resources (OER). The paper draws in particular on the development of a learning design methodology as part of the OU’s learning design initiative. The paper will describe the evaluation of this new learning design methodology as part of an EU-funded project, Design Project. The methodology will be described, along with the learning design resources, tools and activities that have been developed. The methodology has been trialled in the UK, Cyprus and Greece and the paper will report on the evaluation of a series of trials carried out in the UK.

Developing familiarity with learning design tools through subject analysis

The application of quality processes to tertiary teaching can result in a moreteam-based approach to course curriculum planning, the instructional designof individual subjects or units, the learning support associated with subjectimplementation and subsequent evaluation. The “art” of teaching requiresmore explicit communication within and across different teams that may beinvolved in each stage. Learning designs provide tools for design teams tomap out learning environment attributes such as resources, tasks, people andinteractions. Experienced teaching academics, unfamiliar with such tools,require orientation to them to achieve their communication potential. Oneway to introduce learning design models is to apply them to past subjects astools for analysis. Do they help identify design imbalance? Do they provide ascaffold for thinking about future subject design? Four simple local designmodels are explored as potential analysis tools and applied to a subject casestudy taught prior to the lecturer’s awareness of these design models.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VERSUS HUMAN TALENTS IN LEARNING PROCESS

To highlight the differences between conventional educational systems and CBLS - computer based learning systems. It is useful to consider CBLS, as the class of a system most closely related to artificial intelligence - AI. In such a system, the ultimate goal is to create a virtual duplicate of reality for learning, analysis, training, experimentation, or other purposes. Simulating reality is an approach that may or may not be useful at creating experience. This distinction yield several consequences. In CBLS, behaviour should be as realistic as possible, the representation of environment tends to be uniform and consistent and allowing users to act freely within that environment. To teach users through realistic experience CBLS design techniques can make the experience much more memorable. In such an environment the context and control afforded by design techniques allow the integration of technologies and evaluation of the overall experience. Perhaps it is time to take lessons of CBLS and AI in a learning design and teaching tools seriously. At the beginning we will point out one simple question: could the ideas, methodology and techniques of AI also be applied to a development of relatively serious mind applications and can they substitute human teachers? And the answer will be continued in our paper. Keywords: education, intelligent tutors, artificial intelligence, CBLS, brain based learning.

Understanding the design context for Australian university teachers: implications for the future of learning design

Based on the premise that providing support for university teachers in designing for their teaching will ultimately improve the quality of student learning outcomes, recent interest in the development of support tools and strategies has gained momentum. This article reports on a study that examined the context in which Australian university teachers design in order to understand what role design support tools and strategies could play. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 30 academics across 16 Australian universities. The findings suggest that most Australian university teachers have a high degree of flexibility in their design decisions suggesting that opportunities exist for learning design tools and strategies to be adopted.

Effective Teaching of the Physical Design of Integrated Circuits Using Educational Tools

This paper presents the strategies used for effective teaching and skill development in integrated circuit (IC) design using project-based learning (PBL) methodologies. It presents the contexts in which these strategies are applied to IC design courses at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, and the National Institute of Applied Science (INSA), Toulouse, France. Collaborations among the faculty members of the two institutions have produced a set of learning resources and design tools to support the development of industry-relevant design skills and lifelong learning skills. At the pedagogical level, the emphasis is on the development of practical circuit design, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills rather than the mastery of complex circuit design tools. The courses enable students to learn about the most recent technological developments and their implications, using a set of user-friendly tools. The PBL methodologies, intuitive design tools, and latest technology models have consistently produced high levels of student satisfaction with the overall quality of the courses at the two institutions.

E-learning and accessibility: An exploration of the potential role of generic pedagogical tools

This paper reviews a range of accessibility tools and evaluates how successful they have been in helping teachers in higher education and further education develop accessible e-learning materials and activities for disabled learners. It is argued that these accessibility specific tools have had limited success to date, and that there may therefore be value in exploring the potential role that more general pedagogic tools might play in the development of accessible e-learning and accessibility practices. Two examples of general pedagogic tools, learning theories and learning design tools, are assessed for the extent to which they raise awareness of an association between accessibility and pedagogy; highlight potential barriers to and facilitators of accessible e-learning and offer methods and approaches for developing accessible e-learning. This assessment suggests that the general pedagogical tools will have a limited or abstract influence on the development of accessible e-learning, but that this influence could be potentially increased by “blending” the use of specific accessibility tools with the use of more general pedagogical tools. The success of a blended approach to designing and developing accessible e-learning will depend on a number of factors, including teacher and learner agency. Nevertheless such an approach could be significant in terms of seeking to make accessibility as much a pedagogical issue as it is a technical one.

Using learning design as a framework for supporting the design and reuse of OER

The paper will argue that adopting a learning design methodology may provide a vehicle for enabling better design and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OERs). It will describe a learning design methodology, which is being developed and implemented at the Open University in the UK. The aim is to develop a 'pick and mix' learning design toolbox of different resources and tools to help designers/teachers make informed decisions about creating new or adapting existing learning activities. The methodology is applicable for designers/teachers designing in a traditional context – such as creation of materials as part of a formal curriculum, but also has value for those wanting to create OERs or adapt and repurpose existing OERs. With the increasing range of OERs now available through initiatives as part of the Open Courseware movement, we believe that methodologies, such as the one we describe in this paper, which can help guide reuse and adaptation will become increasingly important and arguably are an important aspect of ensuring longer term sustainability and uptake of OERs. Our approach adopts an empirically based approach to understanding and representing the design process. This includes a range of evaluation studies (capturing of case studies, interviews with designers/teachers, in-depth course evaluation and focus groups/workshops), which are helping to develop our understanding of how designers/teachers go about creating new learning activities. Alongside this we are collating an extensive set of tools and resources to support the design process, as well as developing a new Learning Design tool that helps teachers articulate and represent their design ideas. The paper will describe how we have adapted a mind mapping and argumentation tool, Compendium, for this purpose and how it is being used to help designers and teachers create and share learning activities. It will consider how initial evaluation of the use of the tool for learning design has been positive; users report that the tool is easy to use and helps them organise and articulate their learning designs. Importantly the tool also enables them to share and discuss their thinking about the design process. However it is also clear that visualising the design process is only one aspect of design, which is complex and multi-faceted. Editors: Alexandra Okada (Open University, UK). Reviewers: Teresa Conolly (Open University, UK), Rose Luckin (Institute of Education, UK), and Alexandra Okada (Open University, UK)

A learning design methodology to foster and support creativity in design

This paper describes a project that is exploring the development and use of a learning design methodology. It summarises issues associated with trying to formalise and represent the design process which has emerged from our work to date, and relates this to similar findings in the literature. It describes work to date and in particular the iterative development of a prototype learning design system, CompendiumLD, to help designers/teachers create and share learning activities. Our goal is to build on recent research on learning design to develop a learning design methodology that provides support in the course design process with an emphasis on the use of technology-enhanced learning. This includes elicitation of current practice in design, identification of relevant resources and development of a prototype learning design tool. We believe it will be of interest and use to individual teachers and course teams, but also others involved in the design process tasked with helping course teams translate their ideas into technical solutions. We are adopting an iterative methodology focusing on two areas of activity in parallel: a) capturing and representing practice – through user consultation and case studies and b) supporting learning design – through the development of an online tool and associated workshops. Activities have included user consultation, collation of case studies of learning activities, interviews with teachers about the design process and in-depth evaluation of courses. A set of learning design resources and tools have been collated and a prototype learning design tool developed and trialled. We selected Compendium as the initial starting point for our learning design prototype, for a number of reasons: ease of use, flexibility, adaptability, supports the creation of a range of visual mapping techniques, and comes with a predefined set of icons. Figure one represents a screen shot of learning design in Compendium; two roles are shown, along with their respective tasks. Tools, resources and outputs (i.e. assets) associated with each task are shown alongside, with arrows indicating connections. Evaluation of initial versions of the tool suggested that it help users to articulate and share their design process. We are now in the second phase of the project. This includes further development of the tool to include contextual help and scaffolding. We are also undertaking a series of interviews with teachers about the design process, an in-depth evaluation of design across a course process and a series of user workshops and focus groups. Our work to date has given us a richer understanding of the design process and associated issue; however it is clear that there is a need for further research – practitioners are crying out for examples of good practice and guidance in design. Figure one: Visual representation of part of a collaborative role play activity

Learning design in healthcare education

Emerging from ongoing work into educational modelling languages, learning design principles and the IMS Learning Design framework provide formal ways to annotate and record educational activities. Once educational activities have been encoded they can be played, replayed, adopted, shared, and analysed, thereby reifying much that is otherwise lost in face-to-face teaching. The use of learning design tools, including the free and open source LAMS system (www.lamsfoundation.org), allow practitioners to experiment with learning design approaches in their own teaching, both in terms of creating and encoding their own designs and playing, adapting and analysing designs from other teachers either from within or outside a particular field or subject area. This paper reviews the key issues associated with designing for learning in the context of healthcare education, some of the themes and approaches already in development or use, and the implications of this approach on the practice and theory of healthcare education.

Educational design as a quest for congruence: The need for alternative learning design tools

There is a common predicament faced by educational designers, that is, the lack of learning design tools for nontraditional pedagogies of learning. Because of this lack of alternatives, educational designers often use traditional design tools (such as task analysis) in contexts where nontraditional learning activities (such as collaborative projects) are desired. Because the learning goals of objectivist and alternative epistemologies differ, the designed instructional/learning activities do not match the original goals or desired learning outcomes. It is argued that learning design should be understood of as a quest for congruence between learning epistemologies and designs. This paper proposes an analytical framework to help identify the congruence or lack thereof of a learning design. The framework consists of: (1) the employed epistemology and desired learning outcome, (2) focus of analysis, (3) focus of design and (4) the design process. It is hoped that this framework will provide a lever for developing design tools that are more congruent with alternative pedagogies.

The Reload Learning Design Tools

<p class="commentary_div"><strong>Commentary on:</strong> Chapter7: Learning Design Tools. (Griffiths, Blat, García, Vogten and Kwong,2005) <div class="abstract_container"> <strong>Abstract:</strong> The Reload Learning Design Editor (LDE) is an Open Source, close-to-specification, tree-based Learning Design (LD) editor written in Java using the Eclipse platform. The editor tools are complemented by a LD Player, which provides a familiar and user-friendly interface to the CopperCore LD runtime engine. This paper will describe the history and design rationale underpinning the tools, show how they fit into the LD authoring tools framework devised by Griffiths et al. (2005) and consider their suitability to various user roles and design approaches. The paper will conclude by outlining future versions of the software and how these new developments should facilitate the creation and manipulation of Units of Learning by staff in all user roles. </div> <div class="editors_container"> <strong>Editors:</strong> Colin Tattersall and Rob Koper. </div> <div class="demo_container"> <strong>Interactive demonstrations:</strong> The software tools described in this paper (the Reload Learning Design Editor and Reload Learning Design Player, both at version 2.0 as of May 27 2005) are available from the Reload project web site at <a href="http://www.reload.ac.uk">www.reload.ac.uk</a> </div>

Implementation and Deployment of the IMS Learning Design Specification

Knowledge management in organizations, the learning objects paradigm, the advent of a new web generation, and the “Semantic Web” are major actual trends that reveal a potential for a renewed distance learning pedagogy. First and foremost is the use of educational modelling languages and instructional engineering methods to help decide how to aggregate learning objects in learning and knowledge management environments. This article proposes a set of tools under implementation, such as a graphic Learning Design Editor and a delivery system, using learning object repositories to create IMS-LD online environments. We also propose a strategy for the deployment of learning design tools and methods in learning organizations.