JISC

Sharing the LOAD set out to explore the ‘soft’ interface between practitioners and the tools to help them enhance teaching and learning by examining how effective learning designs can be reused in different educational contexts and how closely these real-world designs map on to theoretical models and technical specifications of learning design.

Building on the creative workshop model devised and deployed by RLO-CETL to productive effect, multidisciplinary groups of practitioners and students engaged in four hands-on, creative workshops to distil and extend their learning design knowledge, to raise their awareness of the JISC and to enhance their IT skills. These workshops responded to the need that practitioners have for more effective pedagogical guidance and they allowed the team to identify and capture the “realworld” learning designs that emerge through facilitated group work. The resulting learning designs, hand-drawn onto specially developed templates in the form of laminated A0 posters, have been captured digitally and archived to the project website. Four designs were then selected for their 'generalise-ability' to be developed as reusable pedagogical patterns and these were, in turn, developed as prototype generative learning objects (GLOs). Two of those designs, 'Evaluating Multiple Interpretations' 6 and 'Win a Million Quiz-maker' 7 have proved to be of particular interest to a wider audience and further work and showcases are planned in 2008.

Additional project outputs include the range of templates, documents and forms that provide the resources underpinning a successful hands-on workshop, plus a poster illustrating all the (many) stages of planning, publicity and preparation. A practitioner questionnaire, also available for download, was completed by workshop participants revealing some interesting variations in attitudes to pedagogical design issues between the different participating groups (academics, students, developers, support staff) and these differences are analysed in a short report. An unintended but particularly valuable output was the Learning Object Attribute Metric (LOAM)8 tool, which exists in both printable and fully interactive online formats. The tool allows analysis of learning designs implicit within learning objects and has been developed by the team to analyse their own large (+100) mature collection of learning objects, but has much wider uses (for instance, it has provided a graphical display of the practitioner questionnaire results making
it easier to spot key differences). It has been presented and has attracted much interest both at home and abroad, making it a key project output.

Project outputs, in the forms of learning objects, embedded activities and the learning designs themselves, plus evaluations of the effectiveness of existing tool support, will inform the next generation of learning design tools and templates. The project team has also acted as change agents, facilitating and encouraging academics to engage with ICT in new and appropriate ways and in a supportive, non-threatening environment.