Jonathan Chacón

ILDE: Community Environment for Conceptualizing, Authoring and Deploying Learning Activities

This demonstration paper presents the Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE). ILDE is being developed in the METIS project, which aims at promoting the adoption of learning design by providing integrated support to teachers throughout the whole design and implementation process (or lifecycle). ILDE integrates existing free- and open-source tools that include: co-design support for teacher communities; learning design editors following different authoring and pedagogical approaches; interface for deployment of designs on mainstream Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). The integration is designed so that teachers experience a continuous flow while completing the tasks involved in the learning design lifecycle, even when the tasks are supported by different tools. ILDE uses the LdShake platform to provide social networking features and to manage the integrated access to designs and tooling including conceptualization tools (OULDI templates), editors (WebCollage, OpenGLM), and deployment into VLEs (e.g., Moodle) via GLUE!-PS.

LdShake support for team-based learning design

Existing tooling hardly supports the integral design of learning environments.A learning design tool should support team formation, design exchange and co-creation.The LdShake environment proves to support the design of learning.The LdShake environment appears to provide affordances for devising research ideas. Some educational innovation initiatives require practitioners to team up on the design of new learning activities. However, existing learning design tooling does not integrally support their tasks. Some tools enable authoring of designs, while other tools support sharing and commenting of learning design ideas, but none of them offers an integrated provision of technological features to support the work of design teams specifically. The requirements include team formation, the storage and retrieval of designs, and the promotion of interaction in the co-creation of designs. The LdShake platform has been conceived to enable sharing and co-editing of learning designs. This paper introduces LdShakes technological features and evaluates to what extent they support the aforementioned requirements. A first evaluation context is focused on learning design, while a second one is devoted to devising research ideas. The results obtained in the two contexts are complementary, pointing out distinct affordances and user behaviors (e.g., on browsing designs) that depend on the characteristics of each context, while also bringing to light the relevance of LdShakes social network related features. Overall, the design considerations proposed and the evaluation results obtained contribute toward an improved understanding of how to support networked teams.

Towards an Integrated Learning Design Environment

Learning design research focuses on how educators can act as designers of technology-supported learning activities according to their specific educational needs and objectives. To foster and sustain the adoption of Learning design, the METIS project is working towards the implementation of an Integrated Learning Design Environment ILDE. This paper presents the vision for the ILDE and how user requirements from three educational institutions in vocational training, higher and adult education justify the need for this vision. The paper discusses the data collected in questionnaires, on-line interviews and face-to-face group work with the end-users, as a first phase in the design-based research methodology applied in the project. The results support a vision towards an ILDE that enables teachers to choose among multiple learning design authoring tools, co-produce, explore, share, evaluate and implement learning designs in Virtual Learning Environments. The paper also outlines a roadmap to achieve this vision.

An Integrated Environment for Learning Design

This work has been partially funded by the EC, EACEA, METIS Project 531262-LLP-2012-ES-KA3-KA3MP, with additional support by TIN2014-53199-C3-3-R, TIN2017-85179-C3-3-R, MDM-2015-0502, RecerCaixa CoT, TIN2014-53199-C3-2-R, TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R, VA082U16 and a Marie Curie Fellowship (MIOCTI, FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF project no. 327384).

Ldshake and the “Biologia En Context” Teacher Community Across High Schools

Previous chapters present significant recent contributions around supporting authoring of learning designs, such as ScenEdit (Emin & Pernin, this volume Chapter 13), CADMOS (Katsamani, Retalis, & Boulakis, 2012) or OpenGLM (Derntl, this volume Chapter 12). Other multiple learning design tools have been also reported in the literature, as also explained in the previous chapters.

From a pattern language to a pattern ontology approach for CSCL script design

Collaborative activities, in which students actively interact with each other, have proved to provide significant learning benefits. In Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), these collaborative activities are assisted by technologies. However, the use of computers does not guarantee collaboration, as free collaboration does not necessary lead to fruitful learning. Therefore, practitioners need to design CSCL scripts that structure the collaborative settings so that they promote learning. However, not all teachers have the technical and pedagogical background needed to design such scripts. With the aim of assisting teachers in designing effective CSCL scripts, we propose a model to support the selection of reusable good practices (formulated as patterns) so that they can be used as a starting point for their own designs. This model is based on a pattern ontology that computationally represents the knowledge captured on a pattern language for the design of CSCL scripts. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach is provided with two examples based on a set of meaningful interrelated patters computationally represented with the pattern ontology, and a paper prototyping experience carried out with two teaches. The results offer interesting insights towards the implementation of the pattern ontology in software tools.