THE LEARNING DESIGN IN EDUCATION TODAY
Putting Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Practice
Isabel Azevedo
1
, Dulce Mota
1
, Carlos Vaz de Carvalho
1
, Eurico Carrapatoso
2
and Luis Paulo Reis
2,3
1
School of Engineering and GILT – Graphics, Interaction and Learning Technologies, Polytechnic of Porto,
Rua Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal
2
FEUP- Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal
3
LIACC – Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Lab, R. Campo Alegre, 1021, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
Keywords: Learning Design, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Learning Resources, Collaborative Learning,
Cooperative and Collaborative Work.
Abstract: This article describes the use of learning design to contextualise learning resources in a repository through
the use of pre-defined templates. We advocate a close connection between a resource and its pattern of use
in order to improve learning objects reuse. Moreover, we present the rationale for adopting and using
learning design templates in the TREE repository.
1 INTRODUCTION
Education is increasingly a competitive area and the
vision statements of institutions necessarily address
quality, also by launching more and better services
to students and staff, like repositories of educational
resources. However, a study that aimed to uncover
the diverse views on users’ needs identified the
following obstacles to adopting digital resources:
how to find, manage, maintain, and reuse resources
even in new contexts (Harley, 2008).
Wiley considers the following point as very
important: “the role of context is simply too great in
learning, and the expectation that any educational
resource could be reused without some contextual
tweaking was either naive or stupid” (Wiley, 2006).
The resource’s submitters often provide some
pedagogical advice for its application. Although
undoubtedly useful, the comments in a text format
might vary in the details provided and they might
not facilitate the reuse of the resources.
The main focus of the work described in this
paper is the creation of a close connection between a
resource and its patterns of use, through learning
designs. At the same time, we describe important
aspects that embrace the development of learning
activities supported by computer with a reusability
attention.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2
introduces the main concepts that scaffold the
learning design research domain as well as learning
design templates potentialities. Section 3 provides
the rationale for adopting and using learning design
templates in the TREE (Teaching Resources for
Engineering Education) repository (Azevedo, Ortiz,
Carvalho, Seiça, & Carrapatoso, 2010). It also
elucidates how they are considered. Finally, section
4 summarises the main findings of this paper and
presents some concluding remarks.
2 LEARNING DESIGN ISSUES
Nowadays, there are many technologies used in
information and communication fields that draw the
educators’ attention. It is a consensual idea the
importance of the technology and its impact in the
two last decades. It is also acknowledged the
importance of diversifying teaching and learning
methods in order to respond to diverse learning
styles as well as to provide different learning
experiences.
Learning design aims at contributing to the
reflexion of the mentioned aspects, and
consequently, helping educators in the preparation of
learning activities that respond to different teaching
and learning approaches.
There are many design issues that educators have
acknowledged as being of great value to foster
students’ achievement. For instance, students’
344
Azevedo I., Mota D., Vaz de Carvalho C., Carrapatoso E. and Paulo Reis L..
THE LEARNING DESIGN IN EDUCATION TODAY - Putting Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Practice.
DOI: 10.5220/0003921803440347
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 344-347
ISBN: 978-989-8565-06-8
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
expectations, interests, preferences and learning
styles. In this sense, learning design arises as a new
focus of interest embracing all actors of education
field.
Learning design can be introduced as follows: "it
aims at providing teachers with a framework capable
to bridge the gap between rich, descriptive models
and technologies, and the everyday practice and
understanding of teachers" (Cameron, 2009). It has
the potential to go beyond the learning content
creation itself and proceed to the "process" of
education. In other words, learning design helps to
bring to the stage the learning issue while the
technological aspects come after. In turn, the
contributions of the new technologies to the learning
design also need to be underlined once usual
teaching-learning methods and pedagogies that were
previously taken for granted can now be
reconsidered (Beetham, 2007).
Another definition of learning design is
presented in (Koper, 2005): "as the application of
learning design knowledge when developing a
concrete unit of learning (UoL), e.g. a course, a
lesson, a curriculum, a learning event". The meaning
of learning design knowledge is transmitted by a
series of prescriptive rules with the following
format: "if situation, then method". The left-hand
side of the rule is the learning situation which
accommodates the situational factors. The main
objectives of these factors are twofold - firstly, they
may represent the requirements that any new
learning design method has to meet – secondly, they
can be seen as descriptors of the situation in which
an existing learning design method has been applied.
The term situational factors are justified by the
assumption that one method may behave best in a
particular situation whereas another method may
work best in a different one. Learning outcomes and
learning conditions are the two subclasses of
situational factors. The former is related to the level
of effectiveness, efficiency, attractiveness and
accessibility of the learning design method. The
latter is related to the characteristics of some
elements, such as the learning objective (knowledge,
skill, attitude, competence), the learners (pre-
knowledge, motivation, situational circumstances),
the setting (individual and/or group work, work at
school and/or work and/or home) and the media
(bandwidth, synchronous/asynchronous, linear/
interactive, media types) (Koper, 2005).
Following the IMS Learning Design
specification, a learning design basically describes a
teaching-learning process. This process has several
components, namely metadata, roles, plays, acts,
environment, role-parts, sequence of activities and
conditions. This conception may be compared to a
script of a film or a theatrical play.
It is worth stressing that the term learning design
is used to describe a learning experience supported
by tasks to which students should be engaged to. For
example, students may be formed into groups and
required to discuss the relations between two given
topics; or they may be asked to gather some
information about a theme and then write a report.
2.1 Learning Design Repositories
The use of learning technologies and specifications
should be considered for that wide contextualisation
of the resources. The IMS LD specification can be
used to sustain this approach and state how to use a
Learning Object.
In fact, several learning design repositories have
appeared, based (or not) on the IMS LD
specification. For instance, there is a Learning
Design Repository available at http://www.idld.org,
which encloses a number of learning scenarios.
The European Network for Lifelong Competence
Development (TENCompetence) was a four-year
project supported by the European Commission
through the IST Programme running from December
2005 to November 2009. It used IMS LD in the
context of Life Long Competency Development. It
developed systems using the specification, in the
context of one of its work packages that focussed
specifically on Learning Activities.
Another remarkable project from the pre-IMS
LD era was the Learning Designs Project (Australian
Universities Teaching Committee, 2003), which
generated “generic/reusable learning design
resources”.
The LAMS (Learning Activity Management
System) community of practice maintains a
repository of learning scenarios in LAMS sequence
format (.las files).
Considering all those initiatives, it is expected
that Learning Design Repositories will become
increasingly popular, as the possibility to search on
learning design properties, for example, is a very
interesting functionality to provide to end users.
2.2 Learning Design Templates
To design an effective learning process it is
necessary not only to consider the learning
resources, but also the activities and interactions that
will support the knowledge transfer, and the whole
learning situation. Accordingly, the resources should
THELEARNINGDESIGNINEDUCATIONTODAY-PuttingPedagogicalContentKnowledgeintoPractice
345
be connected to a description of how to apply them,
supporting some pedagogical knowledge. Thus, it is
advisable to state how to use a learning object, and
what learning outcomes to expect in order to
promote learning objects repositories use.
Templates are defined to support different
pedagogical approaches and to provide a practical
context for learning objects. They represent learning
strategies that can be used for a number of resources,
as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Use of IMS LD templates (adapted from
(Azevedo, Carrapatoso, & Carvalho, 2008)).
3 THE USE OF LEARNING
DESIGN TEMPLATES IN THE
TREE REPOSITORY
In the TREE repository there are resources and the
corresponding metadata fields, which are important
for the UoL generation. The user can initiate the
process, not only for resources he previously
submitted, but for any other that he had used before
or have an idea of how to apply it successfully. The
option to generate a UoL is immediately shown to
the provider, when a resource is submitted. But it is
also available after the submission.
There have been some approaches proposed for
systematising activities through the use of the IMS
LD specification in an easier way. One of these
initiatives that exploit informal descriptions of
learning designs is the 8 Learning Events Model
(8LEM) (Verpoorten, Poumay, & Leclercq, 2007).
The 8LEM model was chosen for the initial
creation of templates because of its simple and very
usable approach in modelling common situations in
learning processes. A learning design template has
associated a number of activities and, for each one, a
generic user (a student, a monitor, a teacher)
implicated is specified, and how the task is
conducted. The individual activities are in a
sequence (a “method” in the IMS Learning Design
nomenclature). A UoL may also have one learning
objective for the set of specified activities.
For a resource, the user decides on the template
to be used and a form is dynamically generated to
instantiate the chosen template with the resource
with some fields to be filled in. Then the system
generates a UoL.
The approach was tested and the generated UoLs
were successfully used in different IMS LD players.
To be used in an LMS, if that possibility becomes a
common practice, it is necessary to consider the
specific users of interest, possibly the students that
are following a module, for instance, and other
detailed information.
The use of some LOM fields in the TREE
repository complements the approach.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Some past projects were very important for the
attention gradually given to learning designs, but it
is necessary to advance the use of learning designs.
We discussed the use of learning design templates in
a repository. This strategy permits considering
learning not only in a perspective of contents, but
the activities that can be carried out using the
resources are also regarded.
However, the point of using learning design
templates supporting a pedagogical context and their
utilisation for generating UoL is not to support
instant reuse, but to sustain reuse with conscience.
The final users are still responsible for instructional
decisions and they have to carefully think about
them. Any necessary edition can be done in simple
text editors, but demanding a great knowledge of the
IMS LD specification, or IMS LD editors, that vary
in the degree of ease of use.
Presently, we are conducting our research to the
collaborative work field among educators to foster
the creation of UoLs using a high-level graphical
design tool with synchronous and asynchronous
communication. The main idea is to engage the
educators in interactive discussions in order to help
them to design interesting, creative and useful UoLs.
REFERENCES
Australian Universities Teaching Committee. (2003).
Learning Designs Project. from http://www.learning
designs.uow.edu.au/project/index.htm
Azevedo, I., Carrapatoso, E., & Carvalho, C. V. (2008). A
Framework to Scaffold the Reuse of Learning Objects.
CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
346
Paper presented at the Eighth IEEE International
Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies.
Azevedo, I., Ortiz, A., Carvalho, C. V., Seiça, R., &
Carrapatoso, E. (2010). Applying and Reusing
Knowledge in a Repository. Paper presented at the The
10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced
Learning Technologies (ICALT 2010), Sousse,
Tunisia.
Beetham, H. (2007). "An approach to learning activity
design", Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age-
Designing and delivering e-learning, H. Beetham and
R. Sharpe (Eds), Routledge Taylor and Francis Group,
pp. 27–40.
Cameron, L., (2009). "How Learning design can
illuminate teaching practice", The Future of Learning
Design Conference, (available in http://ro.uow.edu.au/
fld/09/Program/3).
Harley, D. (2008). Why Understanding the Use and Users
of Open Education Matters. In T. Iiyoshi & M. S. V.
Kumar (Eds.), Opening Up Education. The Collective
Advancement of Education through Open Technology,
Open Content, and Open Knowledge: The MIT Press.
Koper, R. (2005). "An Introduction to Learning Design. A
handbook on Modelling and Delivering Networked
Education and Training", pp. 3-20, Rop Koper &
Colin Tattersall (Eds), Springer-Verlag Berlin
Heideberg, ISBN: 3-540-22814-4.
Verpoorten, D., Poumay, M., & Leclercq, D. (2007). The
eight learning events model: A pedagogic conceptual
tool supporting diversification of learning methods.
Interactive Learning Environments, 15(2), 151-160.
Wiley, D. (2006). RIP-ping on Learning Objects. from
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/230.
THELEARNINGDESIGNINEDUCATIONTODAY-PuttingPedagogicalContentKnowledgeintoPractice
347