This article describes a learning design toolkit which guides teachers through the process of creating pedagogically-informed e-learning activities, which make use of ICT and other tools.
As most teachers are aware, finding or creating suitable e-learning resources and creating e-learning activities can be both challenging and time consuming. Clearly, sharing and adapting existing e-learning resources can save teachers time.
The toolkit was developed in recognition of the need for a theoretically consistent approach to learning design, one which relates theory to the desired features of learning and then maps relevant tools and resources against these. The toolkit helps to makes the relationship between practice and theory more explicit and can therefore enable teachers to make better-informed choices regarding the tools and resources they use to support learning.
The toolkit is part of the Dialog PLUS digital libraries project in which teaching staff at universities in the UK and the USA are collaborating to share e-learning resources in the subject domains of Physical, Environmental and Human Geography.
The toolkit can be used as:
- A step-by-step guide to help practitioners make theoretically informed decisions about the development of learning activities and choice of appropriate tools and resources.
- A database of existing learning activities and examples of good practice which can then be adapted and reused for different purposes;
- A mechanism for abstracting good practice and meta-models for e-learning.
At the heart of the toolkit is the notion of a “learning activity”, which consists of three elements:
- The context within which the activity occurs, this includes the subject, level of difficulty, the intended learning outcomes and the environment within which the activity takes place.
- The learning and teaching approaches adopted, including the theories and models.
- The tasks undertaken, which specifies the type of task, the techniques used, associated tools and resources, the interaction and roles of those involved and the assessments associated with the learning activity.
View the article:
- A learning design toolkit to create pedagogically effective learning activities
http://jime.open.ac.uk/2005/08/conole-2005-08-paper.html
Interactive Demonstration:
- An online version of the toolkit is available at
http://www.nettle.soton.ac.uk/toolkit/Default.aspx.
Previous issues of the e-newsletter:
- UNESCO “ICT in Education” Announcement e-newsletter
www.unescobkk.org/education/ict/enewsletter
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