Participation in UNFOLD
Document Actions
IMS LD has its origins in public education, and this remains the area in which it has greatest strength. Nevertheless, UNFOLD has throughout its activity made it a priority to reach the industrial sector. The project was launched to the industrial user group at the eLig (eLearning Industry Group) conference held jointly with EADTU (European Association of Distance Teaching Universities). The project has also maintained close contacts with PROLEARN, a network of excellence established explicitly to connect academic and industrial work in the area of eLearning. Developers of commercial applications have been invited to attend events wherever possible, and more than 50 commercial organisations have been represented at one or more events. This has included a number of companies developing LD applications, including Chronotech, eLive, Cosmos, GTK Press and the.Co.De. The majority of development efforts in the LD area are, however, Open Source. Many of these are funded by educational institutions or grants from education authorities. But there are a number of large number of independent Open Source organisations who are major players in the education market. These are typically non profit making industrial institutions, and a number of these have also participated in UNFOLD , including LAMS, Moodle, Boddington and .LRN
The principal driver of the UNFOLD activities was a series of meetings and day seminar events. These provided the opportunity to gather valuable information, not only about the performance of the project, but also about the development of Learning Design. To these may be added ten workshops, principally addressed to people who were not already members of the Communities of Practice.
Questionnaires and interviews have shown that the level of satisfaction with meetings has been very high, with the organisation of the meetings being rated good or excellent by the participants. The meetings were seen to have provided interesting material and speakers, making them good forums where interaction could take place, and this result was consistent for all the meetings. In terms of supporting adoption of Learning Design initial results showed that 80% of a sample of 134 participants thought that UNFOLD opened up a wide range of opportunities, by providing hands-on information, supporting different types of communication and keeping practitioners up-to-date. Some specific weak issues were identified by participants at each meeting, which helped to improve subsequent events, but the strengths outnumbered the weaknesses at each meeting. A very high number of participants, 97% of total of those interviewed, intended to participate in more meetings, which is a key indicator of success, and this renewed participation was been observed in the actual attendance.
The meetings also revealed a gradual increase in engagement with and use of Learning Design. This was in part conditioned by the appearance of tools in the second half of the project, which made it much easier for people to engage with the specification. As a consequence the activities focused largely on the development and use of authoring tools and player infrastructure, rather than the use of the specification with learners. The information gathered from participants leads us to estimate that the number of UoLs which have been produced with the specification went from near zero at the end of 2004 to a figure in the low hundreds a year later (leaving aside multiple versions of the same UoL with minor variations). As one would expect, this pattern is also reflected in use of the specification with learners, but with a delay from the availability of authoring and run-time tools. At first none of the participants had ever used Learning Design with learners, and this started to change in the final six months of the project, where some participants at all CoP meetings reported that they had done this.
This development in use of the specification is encouraging, and reflects the work carried out by UNFOLD in providing a platform for coordinating development of tools, demonstrating them, and providing support in the creation of UoLs, and finally leading to the practical use of the specification which is the ultimate goal of the project.
Because many UNFOLD participants were only beginning to work with Learning Design their interests were very open ended, looking to make contacts, see tools, and gain skills. From this perspective it is perhaps unsurprising that the online activities which were most successful were synchronous text discussions, which enabled participants to gather varied information and perspectives, and learning activities which enabled participants to improve their level of skills. The forums provided were less used, perhaps because they are better suited to people searching for single answers to specific problems (e.g. detailed aspects of authoring techniques, or use of a particular UoL with learners), whereas a critical mass of participants with these needs had not yet formed.
Given the self-selecting nature of the sample the results are not easy to generalise, and in many respects reflect the popularity of the meeting in terms of countries attending. UNFOLD CoPs' participants came from almost all European countries, from Australia , Candada , USA , South America and Africa . Thus interest in the specification is clearly widespread and awareness of UNFOLD is high, but this does not reflect a wide impact on adoption in these countries (although they might provide an indication of the early adopters phase which occurs in the introduction of new products). The main impact, as expected, is in Europe, particularly in UK , The Netherlands, Spain and France , while on the world scale Canada and to a lesser degree Australia , were the key areas.
Feedback from participants indicates that the UNFOLD web sites, which play a key role in the project, seem to have fulfilled the needs of the community. This is confirmed by the logs analyses of the two sites (the main project web site and LN4LD site for forums and learning resources), where the following points are worth noting: (i) the search for IMS LD is increased in the second period, reflecting an overall impact of the specification; (ii) there has been a steady increase in activity in LN4LD related to basic materials, which indicates the increase in the impact of the specification and its use; (iii) there has been an increase of overall activity, indicating the success of the project in providing support, specifically through Activity Nodes, with good content; and (iv) the events supported this activity, which is strongly correlated with them (both before and after the meetings take place).
