Category Archives: curriculum design

Sharing great ideas – LAMS 2010 Conference and Design Bash

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This year’s European LAMS and Learning Design conference will be held on 15 July at the University of Oxford. Following the success of last year’s back to back events, CETIS will be holding a Design Bash on 16th July, again at the University of Oxford

“The focus of 2010 European Conference is “Sharing Great Ideas”. We will look at technologies, applications and approaches that support sharing, collaboration and open access to knowledge and resources. What are the differing implications for individuals and organisations? Importantly, we wanted to capture the experience of those who have used LAMS & Learning Design and share some of the lessons learnt about Open Education in higher education, the K-12 sector, vocational and professional education.”

Submission to the conference is now open and the deadline for papers is 26 March, full details are available from the conference website.

The design bash will again be taking a more informal, hands on approach looking at ways to share systems, designs and design approaches. For more of an insight into the design bash an overview of last year’s event is available here and you can also explore the cloudscape of the day including designs and related resources.

Reviewing the VLE

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One of the hot topics at this year’s ALT was “the VLE is dead debate”. Following on from this, ALT with colleagues at the University of Bradford have set up a new Learning Environments Review SIG (LERSIG) which has just had its inaugural meeting. Today’s event “reviewing the VLE: sharing experiences” brought together about 60 people in total (online via Elluminate and physically at the University of Bradford).

The morning was given over to presentations from representatives from five institutions (Nottingham Trent, City, LSE, UCL and York) who have/are in the process of changing their VLE. The afternoon was discussion/group work. As I was participating remotely (and like everyone else, multitasking) I didn’t join in the discussion session. However there were a number of key elements that did come through.

The early incarnations of VLEs may well be dead, but the notion and need for some kind of learning environment is still very much alive. The HE community is, I think, much becoming much clearer about articulating requirements from all the technologies (not just the VLE) used in institutions to support teaching and learning. A number of questions were raised about the use of portals and using other ‘non-traditional’ VLE systems for teaching and learning purposes. What also came through loudly today was the recognition that user requirements and continual user involvement in the change process are key to making successful transitions in technology use.

Currently, many institutions in the UK are in the process of reviewing their technology provision, and it would appear a growing number are migration from proprietary systems to open source platforms. There seems to be quite a bit of moving from BlackBoard to Moodle for example. There was some discussion around the lack of take up of Sakai in the UK. From participants it would seem that at the moment the overhead and support for Sakai is higher and less supported than Moodle. Most of the big implementations are within more research led institutions and perhaps not as well developed for a more teaching and learning focus. However, there was a recognition that this could well change and that looking at the “broader framework” is key for future developments so that new elements can be added to existing systems. This is where I would see the developments we discussed at the composing your learning environment session at the recent CETIS conference would be of relevance to this group.

What came through strongly from today’s meeting was that there is an appetite to share experiences of these processes. Stakeholder engagement is also key and again sharing strategies for engaging the key people (staff and students) emerged as another key area for sharing experiences. The SIG is in the process of setting up an online community where experiences, case studies etc can be shared. You can join the SIG at their crowdvine site.

Il Foro

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Last week I attended the Il Foro Conference in Baeza, Spain. This annual meeting brings together staff from the 10 universities in Andalusia who are involved in creating and running a shared virtual campus – Campus Andaluz Virtual. The focus of this conference was sharing best practice around teaching and learning strategies. The conference committee asked me to present about the role of standards in elearning.

Part of my reason for accepting the invitation to present was around my own PDP. I am trying to learn Spanish just now, so this seemed an ideal opportunity to practice. The thought of a bit of winter sunshine may have helped sway the decision too! Even with my limited knowledge of Spanish it was interesting to see how many similar issues around student engagement, creativity, web 2.0, mobile technologies and most importantly effective use of technology were being debated during the three days.

The virtual campus is a totally online option for students, with each of the universities offering a selection of courses to students in any of the participating Universities. There is a main portal which then links to each institutions learning environment.

In terms of my own learning and use of technology, having a Spanish dictionary on my ipod and google translate to hand did allow me to follow more quickly and easily and less obviously some of the bits I didn’t understand than I would have been able to without them. Though most web 2.0 terminology seems to be universally in English, reminding me of debates around the “e” in elearning standing for English.

The contrast to the conference surroundings to the CETIS conference in Birmingham the week before was quite also quite stark. Nothing against the Lakeside Centre but it really can’t compete with this:
Baeza

And the wifi worked perfectly:-)

My presentation gave an overview of CETIS and our development from a JISC project to our current status as an innovation support centre, our work with standards and our changing working practices. I think it’s only when you explain to people outwith the UK the level of support JISC provides to our sector, you really start to (re)appreciate what a valuable contribution it makes to developing infrastructure and take up and use of technology within our sector.

Another personal reflection was my decision to use a ‘traditional’ power point presentation with the oh so unfashionable bulleted list. I know, in one of Martin Weller’s futures I would have been condemned for that. I had thought I would do a prezi with lots of pictures etc, but actually as my presentation was being simultaneously translated and I had to send it in advance, I think it actually made more sense to be a bit text heavy. It meant that my translator knew in advance I was going to use some not very common words and acroynms. It also meant that those in the audience could do what I had been doing early and use their ipods etc to translate themselves. If you are interested, the slides are available from slideshare.

Relating IMS Learning Design to web 2.0 technologies

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Last week I attended the “relating IMS Learning Design to web 2.0 technologies” workshop at the EC-TEL conference. The objectives of the workshop were to to explore what has happened in the six years since the release of specification both in terms of developments in technology and pedagogy and to discuss how (and indeed if/can) the specification keep up with these changes.

After some of the discussions at the recent IMS meeting, I felt this was a really useful opportunity to redress the balance and spend some time reflecting on what the the spec was actually intended for and how web 2.0 technologies are now actually enabling some of the more challenging parts of its implementation – particularly the integration of services.

Rob Koper (OUNL) gave the first keynote presentation of the day staring by taking us all back to basics and reminding of the original intentions of the specification i.e. to create a standardized description of adaptive learning and teaching processes that take place in a computer managed course (the LD manages the course, not the teacher). Learning and support activities and not content are central to the experience.

The spec was intentionally designed to be as device neutral as possible and to provide an integrative framework for a large number of standards and technologies and to allow a course to be “designed” once (in advance of the actual course) and run many times with minimal changes. The spec was never intended to handle just in time learning scenarios, or in situations where there is little automation necessary of online components such as time based activities.

However as Rob pointed out many people have tried to use the spec for things it was really never intended to do. It wasn’t build to manage highly adaptive courses. It wasn’t intended for courses where teachers were in expected to “manage” every aspect of the course.

These misunderstanding are, in part, responsible for some of the negative feelings for the spec from some sectors of the community. However, it’s not quite as simple as that. Lack of usable tools, technical issues with integrating existing services (such as forums), the lack meaningful use-cases, political shenanigans in IMS, and actually the enthusiasm from potential users to extend the spec for their learning and teaching contexts have all played a part in initial enthusiasm being replaced by frustration, disappointment and eventual disillusionment.

It should be pointed out that Rob wasn’t suggesting that the specification was perfect and that there had just been a huge mis-interpretation by swathes of potential users. He was merely pointing out that some critisism has been unfair. He did suggest some potential changes to the specification including incorporating dynamic group functionality (however it isn’t really clear if that is a spec or run-time issue), and minor changes to some of the elements particularly moving some to the attribution elements from properties to method. However at this point in time there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of enthusiasm from IMS to set up an LD working group.

Bill Olivier gave the second keynote of the day where reflecting on “where are we now and what next?”. Using various models including the Garner hype cycle, Bill explored reflected on the uptake of IMS LD and explored if it was possible to get it out of the infamous trough of disillusionment and onto the plateau of productivity.

Bill gave a useful summary of his analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the spec. Strengths included:
*learning flow management,
*multiple roles for multiple management,
*powerful event driven declarative programming facilities.
Weaknesses included:
*limited services,
*the spec is large and monolithic,
*it is hard to learn and hard to implement
*it doesn’t define data exchange mechanism, doesn’t define an engine output XML schema,
*no spec for service instantiation and set up,
* hard to ensure interoperability
*run time services are difficult to set up.

Quite a list! So, is there a need to modularize the spec or add a series speclets to allow for a greater range of interoperable tools and services? Would this solve the “server paradox” where if you have maximum interoperability you are likely to have few services, whereas for maximum utility you need many services.

Bill then outlined where he saw web 2.0 technologies as being able to contribute to greater use of the specification. Primarily this would involve making IMS LD appear to be less like programming through easier/better integration of authoring and runtime environments. Bill highlighted the work that the 10Competence team at the University of Bolton have been doing around widget integration and the development of the wookie widget server in particular. In some ways this does begin to address the service paradox in that it is a good example of how to instantiate once and run many services. Bill also highlighted that alongside technological innovations more (market) research really needs to be done in terms of the institutional/human constraints around implementing what is still a high risk technological innovation into existing processes. There is still no clear consensus around where an IMS LD approach would be most effective. Bill also pointed out the need for more relevant use cases and player views. Something which I commented on at almost a year ago too.

During the technical breakout session in the afternoon, participants had a chance to discuss in more detail some of the emerging models for service integration and how IMS LD could integrate with other specifications such as course information related ones such as XCRI. Scott Wilson also raised the point that more business workflow management systems might actually be more appropriate than our current LD tools in an HE context. as they have developed more around document workflow. I’m not very familiar with these types of systems so I can’t really comment,but I do have a sneaky suspicion that we’d probably face a similar set of issues with user engagement and the “but it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do” syndrome.

I think what was valuable about the end of the discussion was that were were able to see that significant progress has been made in terms of allow service integration to become significantly simpler for IMS LD systems. The wookie widget approach is one way forward as is the service integration that Abelardo Pardo, Luis de la Fuente Valentin and colleagues at the University of Madrid have been undertaking. However there is still a long way to go to make the transition out of “that” trough.

What I think what we always need to remember that teaching and learning is complex and although technology can undoubtedly help, it can only do so if used appropriately. As Rob said “there’s no point trying to use a coffee machine to make pancakes” which is what some people have tried to do with IMS LD. We’ll probably never have the perfect learning design specification for every context, and in some ways we shouldn’t get too hung up about that – we probably never will – we probably don’t really need to. However integrating services based on web 2.0 approaches can allow for a far greater choice of tools. What is crucial is that we keep sharing our experiences, integrations and real experiences with each other.

Design Bash 09

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Summer is the time for festivals, and at the OU in Milton Keynes this week there was a bit of learning design festival spanning the first three days of the week. In conjunction with the LAMS European Conference on Tuesday there were a couple of fringe events. On Monday there was a pedagogical planner summit and on Wednesday a Design Bash which we (CETIS) hosted in conjunction with LAMS. After two days of fairly high level discussion and presentations, the design bash was a much more of a hands on affair giving people the chance to create and and share their designs and systems.

The design bash builds on the tradition of the CETIS codebashes and we held our first design bash as part of the JISC Design for Learning programme. This time around we had a much more open event with a much larger range of design tools – from pedagogic planners such as Phoebe, through authoring tools such as LAMS, ReCourse and Graphical Learning Modeller to sharing sites such as Cloudworks.

The day was fairly free form but we had identified 3 main areas of activity which we used initially to break into three groups:.
*System interoperability – looking at how the import and export of designs between systems can be facilitated.
*Sharing of designs – ascertaining the most effective way to export and share designs between systems.
*Describing designs – discovering the most useful representations of designs or patterns and whether they can be translated into runnable versions.

One of the main topics for discussion from the sharing group was centered around was the development of simple previewing tools so that users could easily view for example a LAMS sequence without having to log into the the LAMS environment. There was definite interest in developing easily embeddable preview widgets.

The authoring interoperability group were able to recreate a design originally developed for LAMS in the Graphical Learning Modeller (GLM) tool the export that design into the ReCourse authoring tool and preview the design. There were a few wee glitches (mainly around the resource folder export) and these are documented in the cloudworks site. We also had a live demo of creating a LAMS sequence from a high level design pattern stored in the Design Principles Database (DPB). The sequence was then added to the LAMS community site. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to recreate/import/export this design into the other systems, but both Susanne (GLM) and Dai (Recourse) have committed to do that. So we did actually manage to get a bit of daisy-chaining of designs in and out of systems. If we had had more time I’m sure we would have had more examples of this.

There was also a lot of discussion about the integration of widgets and web services in general into various design systems. Recourse and LAMS can both now integrate the wookie widget server. The Compedium LD team from the OU had some very interesting discussions about the possibilities of using widgets to extend the collaborative capabilities of their design visualisations through for example the integration of a chat widget.

Central to the day was the use of the Cloudworks site being developed by the OU LDI team. At this point I would like to give a special mention to Juliette Cluver who had just rebuilt the system and launched it on Tuesday – it worked at treat! The cloudscape for the day has links to all the sytems, designs, twitter messages and photos from the day. A great record of the day something we hope that can be maintained and extended. So, if you are interested in finding out more or adding a design/system the please go and have a look at the cloudscape for the day and add your contributions.

SCORM 2.0 and beyond LETSI seminar

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Last Wednesday along with 190 others I joined the “SCORM 2.0 and Beyond” webinar hosted by LETSI. This was the first in a series of community events LETSI are hoping to organise to promote its activities.

Charles Allan started the session with an overview of developments with SCORM and the relationship between LETSI and the ADL. Orginally it was envisaged that ADL would hand over governance/stewardship of SCORM to “the community” i.e. LETSI. However, there have been some developments and the current state of play is that ADL are continuing to steward SCORM and may (or may not) release new versions. LETSI is working on developing SCORM 2.0 which is not as close to the existing SCORM specification as originally thought. So in effect they are starting with a blank sheet and are looking at wider context of data interoperability than the original SCORM model which was primarily content driven. SCORM 2.0 developments will be focused on the different types of data which need to be shared including: learning activities; resources, people, competency frameworks there was also a nod to webservices and mashups.

Charles explained that LETSI is not a standards development body or a trade association. It sees itself rooted within the implementation community. LETSI will work with existing bodies to help shorten adoption lifecycles through filling a gap in the current standards community. Specifically by helping to build communities and developing agile software development processes which should speed up consistency of implementation approaches. LETSI will not build a spec if there is an existing one which is fit for purpose and they are currently reviewing a number of standards as part of the SCORM 2.0 scoping work. LETSI hopes to enable a move towards a more agile, iterative standards development process.

Four technical working groups have been formed (more info on the LETSI website) and they hope to produce a technical roadmap later this year. Over the coming months there will be a series of webinars on candiate technologies, continued development of potential software architecture solutions as well as continuing liasion with formal standards bodies. Future developments will include investigation of orchestration of content/activities and compentency frameworks amongst others and they are actively looking for working group participation. The working groups are open to anyone to join, however to have voting rights you need to pay a (nominal, I think $100 was mentioned) membership fee.

It will be interesting to see how developments progress this year and if an organisation like LETSI can actually effectively work with existing standards agencies and speed up the specification development and release process. I hope they don’t get bogged down in the same bureaucratic processes which have made the formal standards process so drawn out.

Mapping outputs of Design for Learning programme to IMS LD – a level of interoperability for learning designs

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As additional output to the JISC Design for Learning programme, we were asked to produce a mapping of programme outputs to IMS Learning Design. Six different outputs, including a LAMS sequence, outputs from the pedagogy planner tools, and poster designs, were transformed into IMS LD using the ReCourse and RELOAD tools.

In most cases it was possible to identify common IMS LD elements and a working uol (unit of learning)was produced for each example. However the completeness of these varied considerably depending on the level of descriptions provided about the actual details of the activities to be undertaken.

The findings illustrate the need for more explicit descriptions of activities to allow designs to be “run” either online or off-line. There also appears to emerge an almost natural point where the planning process ( e.g. what is my design called, who is it for, what activities will I use etc) ends and the design process (e.g. how will a learner actually participate in activities, what is the sequence of activities ) begins.

The report is available to download from the Design for Learning support wiki. A discussion topic has also been started on the report in the pedagogical planners group in facebook. Please feel free to join the group and contribute to the discussion.

New (Facebook) group for anyone interested in pedagogic planners

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As part of the past two LAMS European conferences, James Dalziel and the LAMS team have provided an opportunity to bring together a group of people with an interest in developing pedagogic planning tools. During each meeting it has become evident that there is a burgeoning community developing around pedagogical planning – not least from JISC with the Phoebe and LPP planning tools. There has also been a general feeling of how can we continue these discussions? So, in an attempt to do just that, I’ve set up a facebook group called Pedagogical Planners. If you or anyone you know is interested in this area, please join the group and share your projects and ideas, events.

LAMS 2008 European conference

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Despite the shadow of the lambsgate affair, the LAMS 2008 European conference was another bit step forward (imho) towards a consensus about the future development of learning design tools and the mechanisms for sharing designs. It seems that the pieces of the jigsaw are starting to come together and, from the cross section of projects in attendance, there was a genuine willingness to share best practice and not re-invent the wheel.

Grainne Conole has already done an excellent job of summarizing the conference keynotes from Stephen Downes, Helen Beetham and James Dalziel. Grainne’s own keynote gave an excellent overview not only of the work she and her team are doing at the OU, but also of the key issues researchers are faced with in the design for learning space such as just how/can design for learning help to exploit engaging technologies to create better learning experiences? Grainne highlighted some of the contradictions that they are finding through workshop and interviews with OU staff around design including:
*design as a process -v- design as a product
*the capturing of designs: when/what to concentrate on – the explicit or the implicit?
*representations: when to use textual or visual (or both)
*the life-cycle of designs: tensions between static and dynamic elements.

This mirrors the experience of the JISC Design for Learning programme. It was in a way re-assuring to see that even with the different production process that are in place in an institution like the OU, there is a commonality around the key issues in terms of capturing (and sharing) the design process.

One of the projects the OU is working on is a social networking site for designs called Cloudworks. In previous meetings Martin Weller has described this as a “flickr for learning designs”. The social networking aspect of the site could help move forward sharing of designs as many projects have found that the peer aspects of sharing are incredibly important to practitioners.

Grainne ended her presentation around the need to develop more simple widgets around the pedagogy of designing learning activities which could help to bring some more fun into the design process. The OU have started to develop some widgets and the ReCourse team is doing that too (as highlighted at the recent CETIS learning design meeting). An other example of convergence of development and exploiting of web 2.0 technologies for education.

My presentation focused on the sharing solution we (CETIS) as the JISC Design for Learning programme support project initiated. One thing we didn’t include was any form of social networking, so it was really useful was to catch up with the OU team and discuss possible ways in which we can work together to integrate outputs from the programme into their Cloudworks site.

BTW I think we now might have a theme tune for learning design events. Martin Weller created an animoto video of the conference and by some bizarre coincidence he chose the same music as I did for the video I made for the Design for Learning Programme Design Bash last year . . . spooky or just the result of limited choices of copyright free music :-)

Pedagogy planners – where next?

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A meeting was held on 4th March to get some ‘real world’ input into how the development on the two pedagogy planning tools in the current JISC Design for Learning programme should progress.

The audience was made up mainly of teaching practitioners, most of whom have an interest in staff development and e-learning. Introducing the day, Helen Beetham (consultant to the JISC e-Learning programme) outlined some of the challenges around the changing economic, technical and pedagogical issues that face the teaching and learning community today. The role of planning teaching and learning is becoming of increasing importance as is the recognition of the need to share and represent practice. Although technology offers tantalising visions for the potential of shared learning design practice, the tools we have available at the moment still seem to fall short of the vision. Very few (if any) tools can capture and delivery the myriad of teaching practice that exist. So, is it time to start thinking about a set of teacher tools and services instead of trying to develop more one size fits all tools?

During the day participants had a the opportunity to have “hands-on” time with both Phoebe and the London Pedagogy Planner (LPP). Grainne Conole (0U) has already written about the day and reviews of Phoebe and LPP. The projects then presented their vision of how someone could use Phoebe to create an initial design, look for case studies and exemplars and then export that design into LLP and start ‘fleshing’ out the plan with actual teaching contact time etc.

While both prototypes offer a different (but complementary) approach to planning, they are both very much at the prototype stage. A key question that keeps arising is what is it that they actually produce? XML output allows a level of interoperability between the two just now but this needs to be extended much further so that there is a useful output which can relate to other institutional systems such as VLEs, CMS etc – “where’s the export to moodle” button was heard a few times during the day:-) During the feedback sessions it was clear exporting and importing data between systems will be crucial if such tools are to have any chance of having take up in institutions.