Ongoing Tracking of Engagement in Motor Learning

Teaching motor skills such as playing music, handwriting, and driving, can greatly benefit from recently developed technologies such as wearable gloves for haptic feedback or robotic sensorimotor exoskeletons for the mediation of effective human-human and robot-human physical interactions. At the heart of such teacher-learner interactions still stands the critical role of the ongoing feedback a teacher can get about the student's engagement state during the learning and practice sessions. Particularly for motor learning, such feedback is an essential functionality in a system that is developed to guide a teacher on how to control the intensity of the physical interaction, and to best adapt it to the gradually evolving performance of the learner. In this paper, our focus is on the development of a near real-time machine-learning model that can acquire its input from a set of readily available, noninvasive, privacy-preserving, body-worn sensors, for the benefit of tracking the engagement of the learner in the motor task. We used the specific case of violin playing as a target domain in which data were empirically acquired, the latent construct of engagement in motor learning was carefully developed for data labeling, and a machine-learning model was rigorously trained and validated

A model-driven development approach for learning design using the LPCEL Editor

Complex learning scenarios are represented using Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs). Different people with specific skills usually design these scenarios. The IMS LD is a commonly used EML for which some visual editors are being created in order to assist the authoring process. However, these editors have a limited level of expressiveness and do not provide the facilities for designers to collaborate in the design process. The LPCEL Editor provides a broad level of expressiveness and facilitates the authoring process with an editor that includes: (1) Visual Elements, (2) Intermediate Representation, (3) Learning Patterns, (4) Collaboration tools and (5) Web Services. In order to verify that the components are sufficient, we conducted a user evaluation to analyze their perspective regarding the level of functionality of the tools

Towards a Benchmark for the Evaluation of LD Expressiveness and Suitability

Commentary on: Chapter2: The Learning Design Specification (Olivier and Tattersall, 2005)Abstract: IMS Learning Design (LD) has been presented as the EML standard. We propose a methodology to achieve an evaluation benchmark for LD and EMLs based on the identification of perspectives and patterns. We consider a perspective as a feature of an EML with a specific purpose which can be analyzed independently. For each identified perspective, we study the involved patterns. A pattern is an abstraction that is frequently repeated in a design domain, it can be considered as a typical solution to a common problem. Perspectives and patterns provide the criteria that will made up the evaluation benchmark. The evaluation benchmark is proposed to carry out two kinds of evaluation: expressiveness and suitability. The final purpose is to contribute to the development of LD in order to enhance the reusability and interoperability of units of learning.Editors: Colin Tattersall and Rob Koper

The Larnaca declaration on learning design

Education faces many challenges in the changing modern world. Learners are changing in their approaches to education – they use digital technologies, they multi-task, they collaborate and they are becoming less patient with teacher-centric styles of education. Educators face many changes – such as expectations of adopting innovative teaching approaches, alignment of teaching to external standards, growing requirements for professional development and difficulties in balancing a complex range of demands from different stakeholders. Government and educational institutions also face many changes, such as the rise of the knowledge economy and the need for different kinds of graduates, a shift from knowledge scarcity to abundance, and the impact of technology – especially the internet via open sharing of educational resources and massive open online courses (MOOCs). In the context of these changes, effective teaching and learning in the classroom (and beyond) remains central. How can educators become more effective in their preparation and facilitation of teaching and learning activities? How can educators be exposed to new teaching ideas that take them beyond their traditional approaches? How can technology assist educators without undermining them? How can learners be better prepared for the world that awaits them? This paper describes how the new field of Learning Design contributes to the central challenge of improving teaching and learning. Learning Design can assist educators to describe effective teaching ideas so that they can be shared with, and adapted by, other educators. While the field has primarily focussed on higher education and K-12 schools to date, it also has implications for vocational and professional training. This paper describes how ongoing work to develop a descriptive language for teaching and learning activities (often including the use of technology) is changing the way educators think about planning and facilitating educational activities. The ultimate goal of Learning Design is to convey great teaching ideas among educators in order to improve student learning. The paper begins with this Introduction, followed by an analogy from music to provide a context for Part 1, which considers the possibility of educational notation. Part 2 describes how this possibility is being realised in the field of Learning Design, illustrated with an example based on a Role Play. Part 3 considers current definitional challenges in Learning Design and its provocative aspiration towards pedagogical neutrality. Part 4 provides a wider conceptual map of education for exploring the place of Learning Design, including more examples of current Learning Design approaches, and how the map can be used to analyse pedagogical theories. Part 5 returns to the relationship between Learning Design and pedagogical theories, and the central question of effective teaching and learning approaches. The Conclusion offers a new synthesis of the ideas discussed in this paper as a foundation for the future of Learning Design, and the Epilogue returns to the music analogy to reflect on the future prospects of this synthesis. While the concepts discussed in this paper have potentially far-reaching implications for many aspects of education, this paper is written primarily for those with an interest in Learning Design and in pedagogical theories. Future work based on this paper will explore these ideas in different ways for other audiences, such as policy makers and typical educators

Design and Implementation Strategies for IMS Learning Design

SIKS Dissertation Series No. 2008-27The IMS Learning Design (LD) specification, which has been released in February 2003, is a generic and flexible language for describing the learning practice and underlying learning designs using a formal notation which is computer-interpretable. It is based on a pedagogical meta-model (Koper & Manderveld, 2004) and supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies. It supports adaptation of individual learning routes and orchestrates interactions between users in various learning and support roles. A formalized learning design can be applied repeatedly in similar situations with different persons and contexts. Yet because IMS Learning Design is a fairly complex and elaborate specification, it can be difficult to grasp; furthermore, designing and implementing a runtime environment for the specification is far from straightforward. That IMS Learning Design makes use of other specifications and e-learning services adds further to this complexity for both its users and the software developers. For this new specification to succeed, therefore, a reference runtime implementation was needed. To this end, this thesis addresses two research and development issues. First, it investigates research into and development of a reusable reference runtime environment for IMS Learning Design. The resulting runtime, called CopperCore, provides a reference both for users of the specification and for software developers. The latter can reuse the design principles presented in this thesis for their own implementations, or reuse the CopperCore product through the interfaces provided. Second, this thesis addresses the integration of other specifications and e-learning services during runtime. It presents an architecture and implementation (CopperCore Service Integration) which provides an extensible lightweight solution to the problem. Both developments have been tested through real-world use in projects carried out by the IMS Learning Design community. The results have generally been positive, and have led us to conclude that we successfully addressed both the research and development issues. However, the results also indicate that the LD tooling lacks maturity, particularly in the authoring area. Through close integration of CopperCore with a product called the Personal Competence Manager, we demonstrate that a complementary approach to authoring in IMS Learning Design solves some of these issues

Orchestrating learning activities using the CADMOS learning design tool

This paper gives an overview of CADMOS (CoursewAre Development Methodology for Open instructional Systems), a graphical IMS-LD Level A & B compliant learning design (LD) tool, which promotes the concept of “separation of concerns” during the design process, via the creation of two models: the conceptual model, which describes the learning activities and the corresponding learning resources, and the flow model, which describes the orchestration of these activities. According to the feedback from an evaluation case study with 36 participants, reported in this paper, CADMOS is a user-friendly tool that allows educational practitioners to design flows of learning activities using a layered approach

Towards a generalised e-learning business process model

Modelling learning scenarios is central for e-learning domain. This has been manifested in the proliferation of the different Educational Modelling Languages, as well as in developed e-learning models. However, the existing modelled scenarios are deficient as they lack flexibility and the agility to respond to the dynamic nature of an e-learning process that is suitable to answer learners’ needs. This paper proposes a novel approach to develop a generalised business process model from a set of related business processes sharing the same goals and associated objectives. The proposed approach has been applied in the e-learning domain, which demonstrated its ability to develop a generalised e-learning business process model that is derived from the existing pedagogical models and technology-enhanced learning artefacts. Moreover, the proposed approach has been evaluated to test its effectiveness in generalising a set of business processes, which paves the ground to apply it in different contexts. The generalised e-learning business process model has been modelled using the industrial standard Business Process Modelling Notations (BPMN 2.0) so that processes can be dynamically enacted in service-oriented environments and, at the same time, adapting to answering e-learners’ learning requirements