Modelling a case study in Astronomy with IMS Learning Design

Abstract

IMS Learning Design provides a counter to the trend towards designing for lone-learners reading from screens. It guides staff and educational developers to start not with content, but with learning activities and the achievement of learning objectives. It recognises that learning can happen without learning objects, learning is different from content consumption and that learning comes from being active. It recognises, too, that learning happens when learners cooperate to solve problems in social and work situations. In all this, it stresses that focus should fall on the learning in eLearning. This paper examines how IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) and the current generation of IMS-LD based tooling can be used to model an eLearning case study in Astronomy, hosted by a workshop at ICALT 2006. Keywords: IMS Learning Design, authoring tools, instructional design BackgroundSignificant investments have been made by universities, colleges, distance learning providers, and corporate training departments in the area of eLearning. Moving from early, tentative use of static HTML pages on web sites, the use of the internet as a delivery technology for education and training is now commonplace, with both distance and presential learning providers exploiting eLearning in their offerings. A standards-based IT infrastructure is in place in educational institutions around the world, simplifying the delivery equation and opening the doors to mainstream, large-scale, web-based education. Many different Virtual Learning Environments exist, including significant contributions from the open source community. Above the underlying IT-standards, rest a significant number of eLearning standards, specifications and reference models, designed to improve the interoperability between systems and remove islands of eLearning.However, some have expressed uneasiness with eLearning, and are investigating how new information and communication technology developments, particularly in the area of collaboration and cooperation, could be brought into eLearning offerings.The IMS Learning Design specification (IMS-LD, 2003; is an open specification, freely downloadable, maintained by an international consortium of universities, system vendors and learning providers. At the heart of the IMS-LD specification is a model which underlies many different behaviourist, cognitive, and (social) constructivist approaches to learning and instruction: People act in different roles in a teaching-learning process. In these roles, they work toward certain outcomes by performing learning and/or support activities within an environment, consisting of learning objects and services to be used during the performance of the activities. The approach separates learning objects and services from the educational method used in the unit of learning. Put succinctly, IMS-LD allows instructional designers to say who should do what, when and with which support facilities in order to reach learning objectives.