UNFOLD Communities of Practice activities
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Over the course of the project UNFOLD has organised a large number of events, including
• 6 full UNFOLD CoP meetings
• 3 seminars in collaboration with other organisations
• 10 workshops
• 26 presentations, demonstrations, panel sessions, conference threads,
The more significant meetings are summarised below, and readers are directed to www.unfold-project.net for further details.
Soon after the launch of the project three evening seminars were run at a residential meeting in Schloss Dagstuhl , Germany , organised by the Valkenburg Group. This group is composed of organisations implementing Learning Design, many of whom had signed letters of support for UNFOLD . This was a valuable first opportunity to contact the user group, and receive feedback.
The project built on this first contact by preparing the web infrastructure and raising awareness of the UNFOLD among potential participants, and in July 2004 the CoPs were launched.
The six face to face meetings for the Communities of Practice were at the heart of project activities, and each lasted three days (with the exception of the final Berlin two day event). These meetings have offered members the opportunity to have in-depth discussions with others working in similar areas, and they have proved to be the principal means whereby the Communities of Practice have become a reality. They have also offered practical sessions which have developed the skill base in creating Units of Learning, and have included break out sessions to work on particular topics. Attendance has ranged from forty to full houses of sixty or seventy, and participants have come from a wide spread of European countries, as well as from around the globe.
The themes addressed by the meetings have developed as time has gone by. When the first meeting was held in Barcelona in September of 2004 there were no tools for Learning Design available, and very few Units of Learning had been created other than those which were published as illustrations to the specification. The meeting focused on updating members on progress, and on planning for the most effective ways of working with the specification.
By the second meeting, in February 2005 in Valkenburg intensive work on tools development had come to fruition, and the meeting was the launch of the CopperCore Learning Design Engine, and the Reload Learning Design Editor Level A. There were workshops on creating Units of Learning with level A, with input from Rob Koper and other members of the UNFOLD team.
The following meeting in Barcelona in April built on this by offering workshops in Level B (which was by then supported by the RELOAD editor), again with in put from Rob Koper and the UNFOLD team. There were also workshops by three additional tools, COSMOS, ASK-LDT, and MOT+, together with a colloquium discussing the research agenda for Learning Design, and initial discussions on usability.
The fourth meeting, in Braga in June, focused on making it easier for non-experts to work with Learning Design, and a large number of projects working on various aspects of this issue presented their work, including Dialog+, LearningMapR, NetUniversité and LAMS. There were also presentations on pedagogy and policy from the Helen Beetham of JISC, and from Dominique Verpoorten on the 8 Learning Event Model. The series of workshops started in Valkenburg came to a conclusion with a Level C workshop, presented by Rob Koper and Daniel Burgos of OUNL. A particularly welcome development was the participation of Martin Dougiamas of Moodle, who took the opportunity to announce that Moodle would be moving towards compliance with Learning Design.
The fifth meeting, in Glasgow in October highlighted the strategic and architectural issues involved in implementing Learning Design in an institution, with presentations from Bill Olivier (Technical Director of JISC), Scott Wilson of CETIS, James Dalziel of LAMS, and workshops on both the SLeD service based Learning Design player, and on the COLLAGE editor, which provides graphical templates enabling authors to create Units of Learning based on patterns, integrated with the Reload Learning Design Editor. One particularly exciting development was the first full pilot of Learning Design in a course, with Liverpool Hope University reporting on their use of SLeD.
The final CoP meeting in Berlin looked to the future, by mapping out the requirements for the next generation of Learning Design based systems, and to take the first steps to planning how this can be achieved. An architecture group reviewed existing architectures to determine how far they provide support for the required functionality, and a pedagogy group examined the possible vocabulary which could be used as the basis for dividing the functionality of the system into chunks which support teachers and learners in their use of the proposed system. The work was given focus by a presentation by Sue Bennett on the work of the Research Centre for Interactive Learning Environments, University of Wollongong , Australia , which has addressed precisely this problem. Other valuable input was provided by Griff Richards of Simon Fraser University Canada , who provided an update on Canadian work on federated repositories of UoLs linked with federated networks of social software tools, and by Rachel Ellaway who described the work done in ACETS to use Learning Design to document teachers practice. Two other significant developments were reported: progress made in providing Learning Design interoperability for .LRN, and the announcement by Code AG, of one of the first commercial implementations of Learning Design to be released.
Three other multi-day seminars have been organised in collaboration with other organisations, each lasting two days. The first was in Paris in March 2005, organised together with ANFOR, and it was intended to raise the profile of the specification and the project in France . There proved to be substantial interest, and the initiative enabled the project to make contact with a number of new members and two implementation projects of which the community was previously unaware.
The second additional meeting was the workshop at Heerlen , organised jointly with ProLearn, which provided a platform for members to share their research. Papers accepted for presentation at the workshop were published in the Special Issue on Learning Design of the IEEE journal Educational Technology & Society, and a number of presentations were also made from the JIME special issue on Learning Design. Finally the project has collaborated in a seminar primarily intended for staff at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the largest in Spain , where the needs of end users can be addressed directly.
Online activities
This intensive programme of face to face activities was supported by online activities. These included an opt in mailing list with over 500 members, news postings on the project web site, and documents and links. Forums were provided for members to raise issues and problems relating to the specification, and some valuable discussions were held. It was however found that members much preferred to discuss these issues face to face at the CoP meetings. There were also online synchronous discussions on the UNFOLD server, and these proved very productive and popular. They were of two types. Firstly a number of discussions were held to enable members who had not been able to attend the events to participate in the debates and exchanges. Secondly discussions were held on position papers and other publications by UNFOLD members. Thus Bill Olivier discussed his paper on the state of Learning Design at the launch of the CoPs, David Griffiths discussed a paper on The Role of Teachers in Authoring Units of Learning , Griff Richards and Colin Knight discussed their paper on Learning Design and Representations of Instructional Intent, members of the Moodle community and UNFOLD discussed their paper on interoperability of Learning Design and Moodle. The Springer Book on Learning Design was discussed with one of the Editors and some of the authors, and the JIME special issue on Learning Design was also the focus of a discussion. The participants in these discussions were very keen to exchange ideas and to pick up on news of research which was relevant to their work. This may be why the synchronous online exchanges were more effective than the forums, as they enabled participants to get feedback from a large number of participants almost instantly, in a brainstorm-like environment, whereas the same interactions in a forum would have taken weeks, and might never have reached critical mass.
UNFOLD has also produced a number of publications, which are available online from the UNFOLD web site. The project's Moodle server, Learning Networks for Learning Design, which hosts the UNFOLD forums, also provides learning activities for members, and a set of example Units of Learning with support for running them.
Funding for the UNFOLD project was up to the end of 2005, but there is every reason to suppose that the work will continue after the end of the project, if at a lower rhythm. The UNFOLD web site and the opt-in mailing list will remain, as will the Learning Networks for Learning Design Moodle server with its forums and learning resources. Both these sites will be maintained by project partners. It is also anticipated that existing members and the new projects which are starting up as the UNFOLD project ends will want to make use of the mailing list to create events which enable them to contact the Learning Design user group, and to disseminate their results.
There is, however, a great deal to be done, and the project partners together with the wider membership will be looking for opportunities to apply for funding to ramp up their efforts now that the toolset for Learning Design is becoming more mature, and institutions are starting to use them with learners.
