A Review of Learning Design:

Concept, Specifications and Tools

A report for the JISC E-learning Pedagogy Programme

Sandy Britain

May 2004

1.1 Introduction

The principle aim of this report is to review and evaluate currently available software tools related to learning design. Whilst the IMS Learning Design Specification (IMS-LD), which we will consider in some detail here, provides a very thorough framework for evaluating the capabilities of software tools within the learning design space, it is also possible to argue that it presents only one of many possible realisations of the concept of learning design and that there are other possible ways to model the concept of learning design that do not implement IMS-LD.

Consequently, it has been suggested (Dalziel, in press) that it is useful to make the following distinctions between:

1. Learning design as a broad concept
2. The instantiation of the concept in the  IMS-LD specification[1]
3. The realisation of both in software tools to support the process of creating and managing learning designs.

In the remainder of Section 1 of this report, we examine in more detail what is involved in first the broad concept of learning design and secondly the IMS-LD specification. Following that we identify the range of software tools that are related to learning design in both senses and construct an appropriate framework for evaluation of these tools.

In Section 2 of the report we review a small selection of tools that are currently attracting a great deal of interest and finally we draw out our conclusions and recommendations based on this work.

Since we are differentiating throughout this report between the general concept of learning design and the way the concept is implemented in the IMS-LD Specification we shall attempt to make the distinction clear by adopting a convention of using ‘learning design’ (small ‘l’, small ‘d’) when we are talking about the general concept and ‘Learning Design’ (Capital ‘L” and ‘D”) when referring to the concept as implemented in the IMS specification. References to the IMS Learning Design Specification will be abbreviated to IMS-LD.

1.2 The concept of learning design and models of (e)- learning

Despite its relatively recent appearance in connection with e-learning, this concept of ‘designing for learning’ is far from being a new idea. In a traditional face-to-face context, many teachers may consciously and reflectively engage in the process of learning design in this general sense as part of everyday lesson planning, whilst other teachers or lecturers may never have given it much thought, but nonetheless make subconscious learning design decisions every time they prepare a teaching session.

Yet, whilst they are hardly groundbreaking new ideas in education, the central ideas behind learning design represent new possibilities for increasing the quality and variety of teaching and learning within an e-learning context:

• The first general idea behind learning design is that people learn better when actively involved in doing something (i.e. are engaged in a learning activity).

• The second idea is that learning activities may be sequenced or otherwise structured carefully and deliberately in a learning workflow to promote more effective learning.

• The third idea is that it would be useful to be able to record ‘learning designs’ for sharing and re-use in the future.

1.2.1 Learning Activities

Whilst learning is an effortful and active process of knowledge construction that humans perform quite naturally, not all learners are equally capable of effective and efficient learning on their own. Indeed, most if not all, benefit from some level of guidance and support. Successful teaching involves a variety of strategies and techniques for engaging, motivating and energising students over and above merely presenting them with well-designed learning materials. There are a number of pedagogical techniques that focus on providing activities for learners to perform either in groups or as individuals that help to create deeper, swifter and more effective learning. These may be in the form of discussions, simulations, mimicry, problem-solving exercises, role-plays and quizzes or meta-learning tasks such as construction of mnemonics and mind-maps.

The recent trend within e-learning has been to focus on quite a narrow set of learning activities that can be easily managed within a browser-based VLE: ‘read this content’, ‘do this multi-choice quiz’ etc.  Part of the aim of learning design is to help broaden the set of activities that are used to support learning in an e-learning context

1.2.2 Orchestrating Activities – Creating a Learning Workflow

A second feature of successful teaching is not just the creation of thoughtful and engaging activities for students to undertake, but also giving thought to the sequential order and timing of the various activities and the presentation of the resources needed to support them. This orchestration may form a simple sequential flow, and in most cases it will, but there may sometimes be call for a learning design that involves branching of workflow into parallel activities undertaken by sub-groups before coming back together. Or a design may be constructed that allows different routes to be taken based on achievement at a testing stage within a sequence. Thus a second key aspect of tools to support the concept of learning design will be the notion of workflow.

From the teacher’s perspective there are two main advantages associated with consciously thinking about the process of designing learning activities. The first is that it provides a framework for teachers to reflect in a deeper and more creative way about how they design and structure activities for different learners or groups of learners and the second is that designs that prove to be effective may then be communicated and shared between teachers or archived for re-use on future occasions.

1.2.3 Sharing and Re-using Learning Designs

However there is a problem in that it is not so easy to describe a given ‘learning design’ in a consistent and transferable way that will allow easy re-use. The ‘design’, ‘pattern’ or ‘recipe’ needs to be described at a sufficient level of abstraction that it can be generalised beyond the single teaching and learning context for which it is created, but not at such an abstract level that the pedagogical value and richness is lost.  This problem is exacerbated when we begin to think about creating, transporting and re-using learning designs in electronic learning environments. It is this problem that IMS-LD is intended to solve. A learning design that conforms to the IMS-LD specification

Whilst the benefits of engaging in the process of learning design exist regardless of the mode of delivery (electronic or face to face), they are particularly relevant to e-learning, which, unlike traditional face-to-face learning, has tended to focus on content and services at the expense of learning (inter)actions. Whereas instructional design in e-learning has focussed predominantly on learning objects as the core entity within a course or other programme of learning, learning design, as we have seen, is centred on learning activities. The underlying reason for this shift in emphasis is the feeling amongst many educators that the learning objects approach places too much emphasis on content delivery rather than looking more carefully at what learners do. Also software environments for elearning (VLEs) have been designed to cater for this rather simplistic content-delivery model at the expense of a variety of pedagogical models that are built around collaborative activity on the part of learners. Whilst good and well structured content is undeniably important in creating a quality course, also important are the tasks, activities and dynamic interactions that occur between people (learners and teachers) and the software environment There is no means to encode these features of learning and teaching within the prevailing content-based model.

1.2.4 IMS Learning Design Specification

The aim of the IMS Learning Design Specification is to provide a model within which to describe the structure of tasks and activities, their assignment to roles, and the workflow of a unit of learning as a ‘learning design’, and also to provide a platform-independent notational convention to allow sharing and re-use of these designs.

What we have outlined above are in effect two related but independent ideas that affect the creation of software tools to support learning design. The first is the general concept of learning design (activities, collaboration, workflow etc.) and the second is the particular instantiation of that concept in the IMS Learning Design specification (IMS-LD). It is important to understand that the two ideas need to be treated separately in reviewing software tools in this field, since some of them are aimed at implementing the IMS-LD specification, whilst others may not implement the specification yet they do embody their own model of learning design, albeit one that is not necessarily transferable between systems. Also, since the IMS-LD specification is still evolving, some software designers are reluctant to adapt their software to conform to the specification in its current form, preferring to adopt a ‘wait and see’ stance.

1.2 Background to Learning Design and EML

The development of EML by Rob Koper and colleagues at the OUNL grew out of dissatisfaction with the prevailing content-oriented learning objects focus within e-learning. The team felt that instructional design within e-learning had been hijacked by those pushing a very narrow model based on digital content and virtual learning environments that ignores the richness of interactions between teacher, learner, resources and environment.

EML is a notational system intended to provide a way of describing teaching and learning interactions at a level of abstraction above the specific instance of the context in which it was created. The resulting model acts as a design pattern for that teaching and learning instance. At the heart of EML is the idea that Learners perform Activities in an Environment with Resources.  According to Koper (2001), this general statement about the core entities and relationships involved in learning expresses a key axiom that is common to all major educational approaches.

Unsurprisingly, the OUNL team that had been involved in the development of EML became major contributors to the IMS Learning Design Working Group – the Valkenburg group (named after the location of the first meeting of the group). The work of this group led to the recent production of the first version of the IMS Learning Design Specification. The aim of this specification is to provide a digital format for encoding, transporting and playing learning designs. There are a number of differences between EML and Learning Design. Most importantly it is essential to understand that whilst EML was intended to encapsulate all teaching and learning interactions, LD is designed to work in combination with other IMS specifications such as Metadata, Content Packaging etc. Hence LD does not attempt to include all aspects of the educational process. For example assessment is handled by the QTI specification and so is not handled by IMS-LD

IMS-LD is a complex specification and the best practice implementation guide produced by IMS to assist educators in understanding how to use the specification is a difficult document to read and understand. Consequently there is currently some degree of confusion about how the specification relates to the overall concept of learning design described above. One of the aims of this report is to clarify the distinctions involved as well as the underlying motivations and practical application of the specification.

1.4 Overview of the IMS – LD Specification

The main reason for implementing a standard for Learning Design is to make digital information encoding learning designs consistent and thus both transportable and re-usable in different software packages.

The IMS Learning Design Specification (IMS-LD) consists of three interrelated documents in common with all IMS specifications:

• XML Binding Document
• Information Model
• Best Practice Guide

The XML Binding Document is a technical document detailing how learning design elements are represented in xml and does not need to be addressed here. It is perhaps useful, however, to reiterate at this point that the aim of IMS-LD is to provide a specification of the elements and structure of Units of Learning as conceived in EML. This specification is provided in XML format, which is a platform-independent web-standard notation for describing arbitrary structured data. This means that the ‘Learning Design’, encoded in XML, can be read by any runtime environment that can read the XML description.

A second point that it is important to be clear about is that IMS Learning Design is designed to work together with IMS content packaging as Learning Design does not itself specify information about content. The way the relationship is expressed in the Information Model for Learning Design is that the aim of Learning Design is, as we have said, to model Units of Learning, so:

A Unit of Learning  = IMS Content Package + IMS Learning Design.

Technically this is achieved by including Learning Design elements within the manifest of a content package.

What we are interested in here is outlining how the IMS-LD specification is intended to add value to teaching and learning practice in e-learning, this information is provided using the Best Practice Guide and the Information Model as our source.

1.4.1 The Anatomy of Learning Design

The core components of Learning Design identified by the IMS-LD working group, derived from the earlier analysis performed by Koper and colleagues in their work on EML are based around the conceptual entity of a Unit of Learning or Unit of Study.  This is the smallest unit that satisfies one or more learning objectives. In practice this may be a course, a module, a lesson or single activity such as a discussion.

For any given unit of learning some or all of the following elements need to be described in an IMS Learning Design:

Learning Objectives. One or more learning objectives

Roles. There are two kinds of Roles used to represent people: learner or staff. Specific individuals are not a generalisable component, but Roles are, so the role is specified in the design rather than a person.

Activities. These can be of two types, either learning activities or support activities

Activity-structures. Activities can be aggregated using activity structures. Activity-structures can also reference other activity-structures and external units of learning.

Environment. The environment element contains two basic types:

• Learning Objects which would typically be a URL to external content, tools or tests with optional metadata
• Services. This refers to a service provided within the environment that is available at runtime but cannot be specified at design-time. Examples of services may be discussion forums, chat rooms, monitoring tools and other features typically provided by VLEs.

Some of the generalisable design components and the learning objectives described above need to be bound to specific instances at either at design, instantiation or run-time depending on the context. This binding is achieved using elements called Resources:

Resources. Resources can be of five different types: web content, imsld content, person, service facility or dossier

Finally the learning design needs to specify how the learning and support activities performed by different roles using the various learning objects and services are organised into a coherent workflow. This facility is provided by the Method element.

Method. The method consists of a Play (or concurrent Plays), which contains a sequence of Acts. Each Act contains one or more Role-Parts. Each Role-Part associates one Role with one Activity or Activity-Structure

As can be seen from the above the Learning Design specification uses the metaphor of a theatrical play to describe the workflow involved in a learning and teaching scenario. The workflow is fundamentally sequential as the acts are sequential, but there may be more complex behaviour than a single sequence through the provision of concurrent Role-Parts which means that branching and simultaneous activity by sub-groups is possible.

1.4.2 The Levels of Learning Design in IMS-LD

There are currently three levels of Learning Design that have been formulated by the IMS-LD Working Group:

Level A: This includes all the elements outlined in the previous section. The main added value to e-learning of Level A learning design is that it defines Activities and Roles as reusable components that can be designed into a workflow using the Method element. It also allows Services such as email and conferencing to be specified at design time as placeholders within the design that will be instantiated by the run-time system. These features are a qualitative difference from IMS content-packaging and SCORM, which include no concept of activities or roles and only work with content so that when they are included in a VLE are completely divorced from discussions or other collaborative tasks. 

Level B: This allows the inclusion of properties and conditions. Two types of property have been proposed: Internal and External. The addition of external properties is important for adaptation to the design based on properties of the individual learner such as may be provided by the Accessibility and IMS-LIP specifications. This means that activities and activity sequences could potentially be adapted to suit the needs and preferences of individual learners

Level C: This provides a notification capability that allows messaging between system components and means the flow of events could be adapted at run-time based on event triggers such as completion of earlier tasks. This paves the way for adaptive sequencing capabilities as well as role-play and event-driven simulations.

1.4.3 Building a Learning Design

The Best Practice Guide describes a sequence of steps that characterise the development of a learning design for a unit of learning:

1. The first task is to analyse a specific educational problem as a use case and then turn it into a scenario describing the learning objectives and tasks or activities establishing the basic order of events that can be captured in a narrative form.

2. It is suggested in the Best Practice Guide that the narrative is then cast into UML activity diagram. This UML diagram then forms the basis for creating the XML document that implements the IMS-LD spec

3. Then the actual content (resources) can be created and finally a content package can be created that incorporates the learning design.

Table 1 below distinguishes the various activities involved in the process of learning design and how each of those stages is handled within IMS-LD.

Table 1. Key Activities in Learning Design

This outline of the process of creating a learning design illustrates very well the need for software tools to be developed in order for ordinary teachers to engage with this process. Even if teachers were used to developing scenarios in narrative form (as many are not), very few would contemplate turning these into UML diagrams and then IMS-LD conformant XML.

Software tools are needed that will support the authoring of learning designs and tools are needed to play learning designs in a run-time environment.

1.5 An Evaluation Framework for Learning Design Software Tools

In order to differentiate tools in this area we have developed a set of evaluation questions.

These questions are designed to provide a simple and easy-to-use evaluation framework.

The questions are divided into three groups:

1. Questions about the intended purpose of the software
2. Questions about the design characteristics and functionality of the software
3. Questions about the technical aspects of the software

Using this question set as a guide, it is possible to gain a sufficiently rich picture of a software tool to evaluate the nature of its contribution to supporting learning design.

 As part of the research for this report, we have conducted a review of the software applications identified in section 1.5 as being related to both the concept of learning design and the IMS-LD specification. Those tools are: LAMS, Reload, Coppercore, EduPlone and EduBox. We have also looked at the content authoring environment – Lobster.

2. A Review of Software Tools to Support Learning Design

At the present time the most commonly used software for supporting teaching and learning interactions in e-learning is the VLE or LMS. VLEs provide a means for building courses, managing roles and groups and building in the various ‘services’ as defined in IMS-LD such as conferencing, chat etc. However, as we mentioned earlier the course structuring functionality in VLEs typically means structuring content; the activity management capabilities in VLEs to date have been very limited, although some of the major vendors are beginning to respond to the community’s demand for better activity management capabilities, (Britain and Liber, 2004).

During this period, a plethora of dedicated content-authoring systems along with SCORM and the IMS content-packaging and metadata specifications have appeared. By comparison the activity management side has been very slow to get off the ground and for the obvious reason that manipulating digital content in a web environment is a much simpler technical proposition than modelling activities and workflow.

Possibly the most significant software development to date in the area of activity management within elearning and the one that has helped kick-start the current high level of interest in learning design is the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) created by James Dalziel of MacQuarie University in Sydney and WebMCQ Ltd. Although LAMS does not implement the IMS-LD specification, it does embody the core ideas behind the specification in terms of a focus on creating sequences of activities, rather than content. LAMS also acts as the run-time environment for LAMS activity sequences. One of the highly attractive features of LAMS is that it provides a simple and highly intuitive user interface that allows the course designer to drag and drop LAMS activity tools into the workspace and use connecting arrows to organise the activities into a sequential workflow.

One problem with LAMS with regard to the goals of Learning Design is that LAMS sequences cannot be exported for use or re-use in other environments. LAMS sequences can only be run within LAMS. On the positive side, the fact that LAMS acts as both the authoring environment for activity sequences and the runtime player means that the LAMS software is capable of more sophisticated run-time functionality (e.g. real-time monitoring of sequences by the teacher) than would currently be possible if the activity sequence was transferred to another environment.

The eventual aim of the IMS-LD spec is that it should be possible to achieve powerful runtime behaviour based on a transferable xml description of a learning design but both the specification and the tools to support it are still at a relatively immature stage of development.

As of the time of writing this report there are no tools available for end-users that support both the creation and running of an IMS Learning Design at any level. However there are a number of significant recent developments in the field.

The OUNL (the developers of EML) created a tool called EDUBOX, which was originally designed as an EML player but has since been adapted to act as a run-time environment for IMS-LD. There has been a recent announcement by Blackboard of a strategic alliance with Edubox to allow Learning Designs to run in the Blackboard VLE

The OUNL has also recently announced the release of CopperCore, http://coppercore.org

 which is  a runtime engine that is designed to allow software developers to incorporate IMS-LD into their applications. Coppercore provides 3 API’s which cover the publication, administration and delivery of IMS Learning Design. This is potentially a highly useful development that will allow VLE vendors to build learning design into their products although it does not immediately benefit users. There are no known examples of Coppercore implementations as yet.

The Reload project www.reload.ac.uk sponsored by the JISC X4L programme is currently building both a Learning Design editor and a run-time environment for learning designs. Reload have already produced a successful content packaging and metadata editing environment. The learning design editor will become part of this suite of tools. Reload are planning to trial Coppercore as the engine underlying their run-time environment.

In the next section of this report we provide a more detailed evaluation and review of the progress of development and the functionality of the tools mentioned above.

In addition to LAMS there a variety of other software tools that fit broadly into the field of ‘designing for learning’ but do not implement IMS-LD. Many of these tools are intended to support the creation and management of specific learning activities such as concept-mapping (e.g. Mind-Map) or role-play scenarios (e.g. Kartouche) and so on. Finally there is a question over whether content-authoring environments are relevant to a discussion of the concept of learning design. As part of this review, we consider Lobster which is a content-authoring tool currently being offered free to colleges of further education.

ReLoad

www.reload.ac.uk

Reload is a project funded by JISC as part of the X4L programme developing tools to support the learning technology interoperability specifications such as IMS and SCORM. The Reload project has already produced a successful metadata and content-packaging editor tool. Development is currently underway to add the Learning Design specification to the Reload editor tool. This will require research into an appropriate user interface model to allow easy creation of learning designs. In addition the Reload developers are working on a Run-time environment for Learning Design. They are currently evaluating Coppercore (also reviewed here) as the engine to underpin the run-time environment.

The Reload software is in an early stage of development with respect to implementation of Learning Design. However the work that has already gone into the development of the content-packaging editor means that progress should be relatively rapid.

Coppercore

http://coppercore.org

Coppercore is a J2EE runtime engine that has been developed by the OUNL as part of the EU Alfanet project (Kraan, 2004a). Coppercore is the first software to implement the IMS-LD specification. Unfortunately no tools have yet been built that use Coppercore, apart from the test environment that comes with it, although that will not remain the case for very long.

Edubox

Edubox was originally built by the OUNL as a learning management system that implemented EML and was used on a variety of OUNL courses. After a quiet period, Edubox has now re-emerged with a recent announcement of a new strategic alliance between the OUNL and Blackboard to use Edubox to introduce learning design and more sophisticated activity management into their course management system. Edubox is currently being re-engineered to support IMS Learning Design and will be available later in 2004.

Learning Activity Management System (LAMS)

www.lamsinternational.com

LAMS represents the most comprehensive implementation of the concept of Learning Design available to date. Although it is still quite limited in its functionality and flexibility (for example sequences cannot be created or adapted easily on the fly), it includes innovative design features that put it at the forefront of current tools for activity management. LAMS was reviewed in-depth as part of this author’s report on elearning environments earlier this year (Britain and Liber, 2004).

LAMS has already made a significant contribution to this area by demonstrating how software tools can support different models of e-learning practice than the ones that we have become accustomed to expect from commercial VLEs. It will be interesting to see how LAMS develops over the next 12 months and how the commercial VLE players and open-source tools respond to the challenge laid down by LAMS. What LAMS does not do is create exportable Learning Designs that can be run in other environments. But, as yet neither has anything else, and it is only when IMS-LD begins to be used in earnest that the extent of technical difficulties associated with accommodating the nuances of external environments and tools will begin to be realised.

EduPlone LearningSequence

http://eduplone.net

EduPlone is a learning content management system built on the open-source content management system  - Plone, combined with the Web application server and development environment - Zope. Because Plone has a built-in workflow engine that can handle roles, activities and sequences, it has allowed the development of the LearningSequence product which provides initial support for Learning Design Level A (Kraan, 2004b). According to the CETIS article by Wilbert Kraan, the capability for rich collaborative designs is limited by the nature of the workflow in Plone which is much more designed around that of a single person’s activity.

Lobster

www.lobster-online.co.uk

Lobster is an easy to use content authoring and structuring tool that has the added benefit of being an online environment that allows for collaborative authoring using a consistent database of assets.

As a content structuring tool, it is a point of argument as to whether Lobster is a learning design tool. Lobster allows creation of content that could specify an activity although the only activity-creation tools included with Lobster are question and test tools. Lobster allows the construction of a sequence of content. If each page of content, contains a task for learners to perform then, is this equivalent to a Learning Workflow?

Conceptually, Lobster raises the issue of how far the rich pedagogical metadata of LOM actually comprehends the notion of ‘activity’ within the notion of ‘object’. E.g. it has been argued that a learning object by definition has planed outcomes, which suggests that it too must be activity-based, even if that activity is expressed at the level of structuring of content and requests-for-content. What does the notion of activity in LD add, and how is it intrinsically different?

The main difference between Lobster (and other content authoring tools) and what may be expected of a learning design tool is that Lobster has no notion of ‘People’ (roles or groups) built into it, so there is no sense in which activities expressed as interactions between people can form part of the design.

3. Discussion and Conclusions

The outcomes of the review of software tools conducted in this study are summarised in the table in appendix 1.

The main conclusion to be drawn from this review is that software development in this field is still at an immature stage although there are several exciting strands of development in progress. This means that whilst some software has been completed and other products are soon to be completed, few of the systems reviewed here have been widely used in practice as yet.

A significant step forward in the widespread visibility of learning design is the Blackboard / Edubox announcement of a strategic alliance. It will be interesting to see how the other major commercial VLE vendors respond to Learning Design in the light of this announcement.

Most of the tools we have looked at here aim to implement the IMS-LD specification at some level. By contrast LAMS has been developed to implement the concept of learning design but is not intended to implement the specification in its current form. There are other software tools in existence, which we have not looked at in detail here, that support aspects of the process of learning design but have not been specifically developed with ‘learning design’ in mind.

 It will be interesting to see how IMS-LD works in practice and just how re-usable designs turn out to be, given dependence on unknown environments and services. At the moment the only collaborative activity tools (services) defined by the IMS-LD are send-mail and conferencing. A wider variety of tools need to be developed and it is up to the practitioner community to both demand pedagogically useful tools and to be involved in their development.

These points highlight the influence of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to software development in learning design. The IMS-LD specification (and its predecessor EML) are examples of top-down attempts to specify in advance a framework for capturing all the salient information about a learning and teaching situation. However, as some software designers have noted, to write software to conform to the specification means conforming to one particular viewpoint on what is required from tools for learning design, which may hamper the creativity of the software designer. Meanwhile the bottom-up influence of creative software development should continue to help shape and refine the specifications.

Additionally, experience with other IMS interoperability specifications such as the Enterprise specification has shown that coordination and agreement between implementers has been a key factor in achieving interoperability by resolving inevitable differences in the interpretation of the semantics of fields. This is likely to be even more the case with a specification as complex as the Learning Design specification.

What is clearly missing at the present time is feedback from communities of practitioners on both the specification and the wider concept of learning design. A very worthwhile recent development in this area is the European Framework 6, UNFOLD, project. Clearly the Elearning and Pedagogy programme should establish links with this project.

In this report we have followed both Dalziel (in press) and Beetham (2004) in drawing a distinction between software tools that support the implementation of the IMS Learning Design Specification, which constitute the majority of tools we have examined here, and tools that support the more general process of learning design or ‘designing for learning’. Of the tools we have looked at here LAMS exemplifies this category. Further work is required to look more closely at the contribution of these tools and at the capabilities of LAMS in particular.

In this report we have elaborated on a distinction that is currently becoming popular between ‘Learning Activities’ and ‘Learning Objects’. The notion of learning objects has increasingly become linked with single-learner, content-delivery instructional approaches within e-learning, whilst the notion of ‘learning activities’ appeals to those designing for a more interactive, multi-learner context. The general concepts of learning activities and learning design are indeed attractive. However, for them to be computationally useful they need to be grounded in a specification. IMS-LD provides one way to do this, by stating in precise terms what it is that an activity is assumed to involve and how it relates to content and other components. Any alternative formulation of these ideas whether in the form of software, specification or description should also aim to be precise and grounded as this enhances understanding whereas vague descriptions and allusions to ideas that are not actually implemented only serve to cause confusion. This report represents an attempt to provide a clear summary of the current state of the field of learning design.

4. Recommendations

The following recommendations arise from the work conducted in this report. This report was funded as part of the e-learning and pedagogy programme and the principle aim of these recommendations is to assist JISC in directing the further activities of this programme related to learning design:

4.1 In this report we have pursued the idea that the concept of learning design can be usefully distinguished from the implementational level. That is, the embodiment of the concept in the IMS-LD specification, EML or any other specification.  Further work needs to be conducted to examine the range of approaches to ‘designing for learning’ in use by teachers and lecturers and the software tools that are or could be used to support these activities.

4.2 LAMS is one of the most interesting tools at the present time as it is the first software tool to persuasively demonstrate the concept of learning design in practice. Consequently further work should be conducted examining the benefits and limitations of the LAMS software in UK HE and FE contexts.

4.3 Conduct ongoing work with the IMS-LD authoring tools and runtime environments reviewed in this report as they become available, to examine how well the IMS-LD specification caters for the pedagogical needs of teachers and learners. This work may be expected to feedback into both the ongoing development of the specification and the development of tools to support learning design. Key bodies in conducting this work are CETIS and the UNFOLD project mentioned above. It is recommended that this programme works in collaboration with both of these groups where possible.

References

Beetham, H. (2004) Review: Developing E-learning models for the JISC Practitioner Communities.

Britain, S. and Liber, O. (2004) A Framework for the Pedagogical Evaluation of E-learning Environments.

Dalziel (in press) The Development of the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS).

Koper E.R.J. (2001). Modelling Units of Study from a Pedagogical Perspective: the pedagogical meta model behind EML (http://eml.ou.nl/introduction/docs/ped-metamodel.pdf)

Kraan, W. (2004a) Coppercore to power Learning Design implementations. http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20040126154220

Kraan, W. (2004b) Eduplone reveals initial IMS Learning Design support http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20040415020953