System Developers and Learning Design
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A specification such as Learning Design is simply a document, and without the contribution of systems developers it can be of no more than academic interest. This is true not only because the tools which they develop enable the specification to be used in practice, but also because development of reference implementations exposes possible ambiguities in the specification, and establishes accepted practice in interpreting it.
The Valkenburg Group was established to coordinate this work for OUNL EML, and later this was extended to Learning Design. The UNFOLD Community of Practice (CoP) for System Developers has built on this work, so that developers can use effective implementations, and ensure consistency in developing and interpreting the specification. The CoPs meetings organised by UNFOLD have provided an opportunity for developers to demonstrate the evolving applications, and to keep their peers up to date on progress, representatives of almost all the applications mentioned in “Current State of Tooling” below have participated in UNFOLD meetings. As the tooling has matured it has been possible to test and demonstrate interoperability between applications. Practical sessions working on mappings between Learning Design and the XML generated by applications have also proved valuable.
UNFOLD has also facilitated direct contacts between developers, both through forums and chat sessions, and in particular by eMail.
Although the CoP is by no means closed to proprietary developers, many of the development projects participating are Open Source. This has made it possible for a number of projects to build on existing applications, and particularly the two emerging Open Source reference implementations: the Reload Learning Design Editor and the CopperCore Learning Design Engine. For example SLeD and the Reload Player make use of the CopperCore engine, while Collage and theCo.De have made use of the Reload Learning Design Editor and its libraries.
The System Developer's Community of Practice helped to clarify a number of key issues through dialogue and subsequent publication in the Springer book “Learning Design: A Handbook on Modelling and Delivering Networked Education and Training” and the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME). One area which is of particular interest at the time of writing is the integration of services, as the specification itself only has a limited number of services. This is closely related to ongoing discussions of the architecture which specifies the roles of the applications which work with learning design. The collaboration between systems developers which has been established in UNFOLD has without doubt been productive, and looks set to continue for some time to come.
