Learning Designers and Learning Design
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Learning designers who produce eLearning standards compliant designs, learning resources and activities obtain undoubted benefits in terms of interoperability and standard search criteria. This gain has, however, come at a cost, as they have found that their choice of pedagogy has been restricted. The standards available only support a single learner working in isolation, the role of the teacher is minimised, and the activities available are largely restricted to a relatively simple ‘deliver-and-test' approach.
IMS Learning Design provides the opportunity to overcome these limitations. The specification is a modelling language which can be used to define and implement a wide (and in principal unlimited) range of pedagogies. Learners can work in groups, alone, and with teachers in activities which evolve over time.
If Learning Design is to line up to this promise of enabling better learning, a critical mass of useful and effective Units of Learning (UoLs) needs to be available to be used by teachers and learners. In achieving this the role of learning designers and authors of learning materials is clearly essential, but those interested in working with the specification had no example UoLs to work from (apart from those in the specification documents), nor any way of learning essential skills. One of the key roles of the Learning Designers CoP has been to meet this need. A series of workshops has been organised at CoP meetings to raise the skills base, and online learning activities have also been provided, together with resources, including a collection of runnable and commented UoLs.
To inform the process of developing UoLs the CoP has facilitated links with the teachers and pedagogic experts who use the UoLs, clarifying the issues surrounding the nature of patterns and templates, and how they should be implemented.
Learning designers need authoring tools, and platforms for playing their designs, and the CoP has provided up to date information on available tools, and, perhaps more importantly, feedback to developers on the effectiveness of available applications, and outstanding user needs. This process has supported the production of multiple authoring tools, and multiple platforms capable of playing their designs, and so improve the outcomes which Learning Designers can achieve.
At present any learning designers using the specification needs knowledge of a number of fields, not only pedagogy but also software and programming languages, eLearning and technical requirements. Tools are mainly technically oriented and user-friendly interfaces focused on teachers' needs are still under development. Nevertheless, this gap between teachers and tools will be closed before long with the next generation of tooling, and any person with a pedagogical background will be able to produce Units of Learning and become a learning designer.
