Informal Design Methods & Tools for Developing ID Competencies: conclusions from 3 case studies (or how to mainstrea

1. Informal Design Methods & Tools for Developing ID Competencies: conclusions from 3 case studies (or how to mainstream LD…)

2. Fundamentals 1 • IMS Learning Design starts from the premise that we can produce a formal LD narrative • Has nothing to say about how that is produced • Most teachers cannot do this, or easily understand them • Until this ‘Inconvenient Truth’ is addressed LD will remain peripheral to the Mainstream

3. Fundamentals 2 • What are the Competences required to produce a formal LD Narrative? • Do we have such a competence statement? • If not perhaps we should….. • A job for Tencompetence?

4. WHY? • Existing design skills are ‘embedded’, in a rich working context and therefore difficult to abstract in order to share themKoper • No large tradition of sharing learning designs • A largely untrained workforce with modest IT skills Stiles • Organisational issues ignored in e-learning • No tradition of ISD in the UK

5. Reality Therapy…. • Start from where teachers are in reality - embedded, contextualised, individual, (sometimes isolated & competitive) non-transferable. • “Many teachers do not possess a vocabulary for articulating and sharing their pedagogic strategies and designs with others, particularly beyond their cognate discipline areas” X4L seminar on LD & Beetham

6. Systemic Issues…have been ignored “education is a social and political system, and the checks and balances that keep the system working may not be shifted by any technology” Mayes (Groundhog Day) ….another inconvenient truth?

7. Best Seen as Part of Process Change… senior management engaged accurate MIS information Functional teaching and research separate management by analysis long-term techno-sceptic systematic sustainable evaluation collective core business design once use many E-learning no evaluation design once use once techno-fetish individual Business not understood unsustainable short-term fragmented management by budget teaching and research conflated Dysfunctional ‘enterprise’ rhetoric but no decent MIS senior management disengaged

8. Mediating LD Contextualised Abstract Learning Design Embedded Practice Intermediate Descriptions

9. An LD Continuum Primitives/Artefacts……… Informal ………… Formal (LD)

10. Our Experience • Better to work outwards from teachers existing conceptions and terminologies towards new concepts and terms, rather than to expect them to adopt new frameworks • Back to: • Prepare • Teach • Review

11. Fundamental Systemic Issues • Learning Technology especially LD and LO has an implicit organisational model at odds with the status quo (Pollock, N. & Cornford, J. 2000, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/virtual-universities/) • This is the real barrier to sharing learning materials (c.f. Twigg, C, at Alt-C 2005 http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2005/ altc2005_documents/caroltwigg_qa.pdf & When Worlds Collide - JISC 2004) • This dialectic is the driver - how quick do we want to go?

12. What a Learning Design Technologist Sees The IMS Learning Design Continuum A B C LD Levels

13. What a Mainstream Teacher Sees Many Continuums

14. Implications for the Future • LD and LOs as Boundary Objects (Wenger) for CoPs. • They Need to Carry some Context and offer possible Generalisations (Toshiba & Wollongong) • Lessons from AI Knowledge Elicitation for LD?

15. Problem Space Getting from Here to There:The Bigger Picture 1 Subsistence Economy ‘Craft’ Style Communication with Artefacts and Primitives Tools & Support Semi - Structured Narrative Structured Narrative Sustainable Economy

16. The Bigger Picture 2

17. LD and the Mainstream - an unfolding dialectic • “We may indeed find that learning objects and learning design do help in transforming teaching in education – it just might not happen the way we though it would” • End