Learning Activity Design in Education
This project integrated a variety of forms of automated assessment questions and engines that are pre-existing outputs of internal development and other JISC projects.
The project (LADIE) philosophy was to create a reference model covering learning activities rooted in practice, that was informed by effective approaches to teaching and learning and that was expressed in a well defined vocabulary which could be understood by all stakeholders with an interest in the reference model. Furthermore it was important that the reference model should to be independent of proprietary software, ensuring flexibility and timeliness.
Executive Summary
The LADiE project used a 3-layer approach as a means of bridging the gap between practitioners and technical developers. The ‘top end’ consisted of the teachers or practitioners, but may or may not have technical expertise, but whose primary concern is teaching and pedagogy. At the ‘bottom end’ are technical developers, who are conversant in technology, but have little or no interaction with a teaching environment. In the centre are learning technologists, who are involved with designing and implementing solutions for teachers. The project aimed to develop a shared language for these groups to communicate with each other in an unambiguous language.
The particular strength of the project was that the project team consisted of individuals with both pedagogical and technical expertise The team was essentially divided into a pedagogical and a technical team and work packages were led by one of the teams, but cross checked by the other. The initial task was to undertake technical and pedagogical reviews to explore existing e-learning pedagogies and technologies and to inform the next stages of the project. The literature review from the ‘top down’/pedagogical team further explains this. The ‘bottom up’/technical team produced 3 internal reports, in conjunction with a technical associates meeting, to define existing technology and applications and areas of overlap between these systems.
The next stage of the project was to gather learning activities through a series of practitioner workshops. The reviews highlight key current technical and pedagogical developments in designing for learning and informed the initial development of the workshop materials. Use was also made of previous materials, such as templates developed by Intrallect for gathering use cases and the DialogPlus learning activity taxonomy. Three workshops were run (two in Scotland and one in Southampton) with a total of 28 participants. Participants were gathered from across FE and HE and consisted of both teaching and support staff (generally with some remit in terms of supporting the implementation of learning technologies). A series of learning activities were produced from the workshops, which were then translated into more technical use cases. The bottom-up team worked with the top down team in translating the learning activities gathered in the workshops into ‘use cases’. These were subsequently mapped onto existing interoperability standards and specifications by the technical team to provide a basis for the reference model. The LADIE architecture was defined from the use cases developed, which explored further the technical domain of the reference model. A draft ‘reference model’ was developed which was discussed in detail at a technical associates meeting in February 2006. The focus of the reference model was discussed and recommendations made. From these discussions, the implementation and services guides were produced, and the architecture refined. A pedagogy guide was developed to map against both the technical and implementation guides and also against the requirements gathering process. A gap analysis identified the pedagogic focus of LADIE use cases, and the types of task LADIE gathered. The analysis was confined to the main success scenarios since these are the ones that practitioners are actually using.