The added value of implementing the Planet Game scenario with Collage and Gridcole

This paper discusses the suitability and the added value of Collage and Gridcole when contrasted with other solutions participating in the ICALT 2006 workshop titled “Comparing educational modelling languages on a case study.” In this workshop each proposed solution was challenged to implement a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning situation (CSCL) posed by the workshop’s organizers. Collage is a pattern-based authoring tool for the creation of CSCL scripts compliant with IMS Learning Design (IMS LD). These IMS LD scripts can be enacted by the Gridcole tailorable CSCL system. The analysis presented in the paper is organized as a case study which considers the data recorded in the workshop discussion as well the information reported in the workshop contributions. The results of this analysis show how Collage and Gridcole succeed in implementing the scenario and also point out some significant advantages in terms of design reusability and generality, user-friendliness, and enactment flexibility

Generic service integration in adaptive learning experiences using IMS learning design

IMS Learning Design is a specification to capture the orchestration taking place in a learning scenario. This paper presents an extension called Generic Service Integration. This paradigm allows a bidirectional communication between the course engine in charge of the orchestration and conventional Web 2.0 tools. This communication allows the engine to configure external services so as to adjust their behaviour, and also retrieve information about their activity and use it to influence the orchestration process. This extension impacts all the phases of the life cycle of a learning activity: authoring, deployment and enactment. The paper analyses this impact and proposes appropriate adjustments. A pilot test was conducted and the obtained results show that learning experiences that adapt their flow-based on third party tools while maintaining interoperability, reusability and self-containment requirements are feasible.Work partially funded by the Learn3 project, “Plan Nacional de I+D+I” TIN2008-05163/TSI, the Best Practice Network ICOPER (Grant No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007), the Flexo Project “Plan Nacional de Investigacin Cientfica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica” (Ref. TSI-020301-2008-19), and the “Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2009/TIC-1650).Publicad

Addressing drop-out and sustained effort issues with large practical groups using an automated delivery and assessment system

The acquisition of programming skills specially in introductory programming courses poses an important challenge for freshmen students of engineering programs. These courses require students to devote a sustained effort during the whole course and a failure to do so may contribute to not passing the course. However, it is difficult for the teaching staff to deploy measures to enforce a pattern of continuous work without significantly increasing the required management tasks. A significant reduction of this workload can be achieved with the automation of time consuming tasks such as the delivery of activities or submission grading. This paper presents a case of study where a technology based orchestration of learning scripts was applied in a large enrollment course to promote student sustained effort through the course and keep the workload on teaching staff within reasonable margins. The orchestration system, based on IMS Learning Design and Generic Service Integration, automatically evaluated the student submissions and gradually unlocked the following activities depending on the received results. Such system was used during a semester supporting 425 students and 8 instructors. The analysis of the case of study followed a mixed method based on qualitative and quantitative data, and revealed a significant reduction of the orchestration workload on the teaching staff, allowing the strategy of continuous work to be applied in a course with high enrollment. Additionally, the application of these techniques show statistically significant differences in the drop out rate with respect to previous editions of the course.Work partially funded by the EEE project, “Plan Nacional de I+D+I TIN2011-28308-C03-01” and the “Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2009/TIC-1650)

Supporting the tutor in the design and support of adaptive e-learning

The further development and deployment of e-learning faces a number of threats. First, in order to meet the increasing demands of learners, staff have to develop and plan a wide and complex variety of learning activities that, in line with contemporary pedagogical models, adapt to the learners’ individual needs. Second, the deployment of e-learning, and therewith the freedom to design the appropriate kind of activities is bound by strict economical conditions, i.e. the amount of time available to staff to support the learning process. In this thesis two models have been developed and implemented that each address a different need. The first model covers the need to support the design task of staff, the second one the need to support the staff in supervising and giving guidance to students' learning activities. More specifically, the first model alleviates the design task by offering a set of connected design and runtime tools that facilitate adaptive e-learning. The second model alleviates the support task by invoking the knowledge and skills of fellow-students. Both models have been validated in near-real-world task settings

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

E2ML: A Visual Language for the Design of Instruction

The last decade has brought about a major change in higher education. Course design has developed from a craftsmanship-like process to a structured production, which involves interdisciplinary teams and requires more complex communication skills. This conceptual article introduces E2ML-Educational Environment Modeling Language-a visual language for supporting complex instructional design processes. E2ML can be used for visualizing the intermediate and final results of design, thus providing documentation in a shared language that can enhance team communication, improve design, and contribute to the development of high-quality instruction. The language and its formal features are presented from a conceptual point of view and illustrated by examples. The main results of a first evaluation study are reported, and the exploitation of E2ML in practice as well as its costs and benefits are critically discusse

Context awareness for collaborative learning with uncertainty management

Postprint (published version

Learning design for software engineering courses

This paper presents a customization of a learning design approach, OULDI, to designing and implementing Software Engineering courses. We propose an iterative process for the application of the OULDI views. This process starts with a course map view and follows a series of steps that ends with the evaluation of the design reflecting on the balance of the proposed activities. A case study is presented in which two institutions were involved in the design and implementation of an experimental software engineering course. Feedback from students, designers and lecturers was collected to support the validation of the design and implementation of the course. This showed that learning design, with the process proposed here, is a feasible approach for the design of software engineering courses