Designing Active Learning in Moodle – a preview of the Learning Designer tools

Patricia Charlton, DionisisDimakopoulos, Bernard Horan, Eileen

Kennedy, Diana Laurillard, Joanna Wild

Learning Designer Tools

Learning Designerhttp://learningdesigner.org/

CRAMhttp://learningdesigner.org/CRAM

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What conditions are required for active learning to take place?

Learning experience needs to be designed

Three cycles of communication between the teacher and the learners must be engaged (Laurillard, 2012)

Teacher

communication

cycle

Teacher practice

and modelling

cycle

Peer

communication

cycle3/17

Teacher and peer communication cycles

1. The teacher must communicate their

concepts for the learner to

understand;

2. The teacher must provide an

environment to model the learning and

for the learner to practice within;

3. The learners must engage in peer

communication, providing their own

modelling and practice environments

to support each other’s learning.

4/17

Learning Designer

An online tool to

support lesson

planning

Focuses on the

experience of

the learner

Specifies

teaching and

learning

activities by

learning type

Learning types:Read/Watch/ListenDiscussInvestigationPracticeProduceCollaborate

Dynamic pie chart shows proportion of learning type in overall learning time designed

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International Learning Designs Challenges: Creating, sharing and reviewing learning designs

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What makes a good design?Peer review criteria for learning designs

1 Test? Is there a ‘produce’ activity, or some way the teacher can use to test whether outcomes are met?

2 Aligned? Are outcomes, activities, and produce activity aligned?

3 Feedback? Is there feedback from the teacher, other students, or the technology?

4 Technology? Does the technology support the learning type(s)? Does the design support critical digital literacy?

5 Other? Are there individual criteria that are specific to this design? 7/17

Time

Outcomes

Feedback from pie chart

Learning time, group size, teacher presence

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Browse, adapt, curate your designs

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10/17

Export to MS Word

11/17

Export to Moodle using IMSCC

12/17

Advantages of exporting to IMSCC

IMS Common

Cartridge v1.1 is

used that can be

imported to Moodle

starting from

version 1.9

Course export

accepted by a

multitude of VLEs

Very good

documentation and

tools to assist

development

Scarce

documentation on

backup/export

Moodle files

13/17

Disadvantages of using IMSCC over native Moodle export

Small coverage of

activities and

resources

supported by

Moodle can be

used in an IMS

common

cartridge

Moodle import

implementation

of IMSCC v1.1 is

buggy

Can only import

labels with very

small length

14/17

Current implementation

Learning designer can now export to

IMSCC v1.1

Exports a series of labels, to help

course designers layout and

populate the module

The labels include information from

outcomes, teaching learning

activities information (title,

duration, group size, resources

attached)

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Planned implementation

The Learning Designer will soon feature an extensive resource manager, listing all Moodle activities and resources

The activities attached to a teaching learning activity which are supported by IMSCC will be initialised automatically

It is envisaged that an API will be published to allow the community to create a plugin for the Learning Designer to export to a Moodle backup file

16/17

Learning Designer Functionality

A library of learning designs: indexed by learning outcome & topic

Abstract designs: migration of good pedagogy across domains

Browse and adapt existing designs

Feedback on total learning time, and the teacher preparation and contact time (CRAM)

Export to Moodle

> Annotation by students for evaluation feedback to designer

> Promotion of design-test-redesign cycle: library of reviewed designs

> A prompt to include a ‘production’ activity for collecting learning analytics on learning outcomes

> Link OERs to designs

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