Modeling Learning Units by Capturing Context with IMS LD

Introduction

Instructional design is essential for every teaching, training, or instructing position. Where other design fields, like architecture, industrial design, and engineering, have very precise languages to communicate and share design specifications within their respective communities, the field of education does not possess such languages (Gibbons & Brewer, 2005). In the field of education, forms of sharing innovations include lesson plans and learning objects, products which implicitly embed design considerations, but do not explicitly address them. Crucial information on the context, the embedded instructional strategies, the theoretical foundations of the design, and the reflections of the teachers or designers are either not explicitly captured as in the case of learning objects, or are not accessible through a general standardized language as in the case of lesson plans.

In the last couple of years, the field of education saw several attempts to fill this gap by developing specific metalanguages or visual instructional design languages (VIDLs; see Botturi, 2005 for an overview). IMS-LD, an extension of the educational modeling language (EML) specification, is a prominent representative of VIDL. IMS-LD was developed to allow lesson plans and best practices to be structured using a common language based on a formal representation, to exist within an XML schema, and to be archived in a machine readable and searchable repository.

As powerful as the design language is, instructional designers, instructors, or teachers are still left with a variety of design decisions, which are not captured by the design language. For example: Which design is the most appropriate for a specific learning outcome? How much detail should be included in the design specification? Which elements are flexible or need to be modified by the context of the implementation? What context information does the design have to include to provide meaningful and sufficient information to subsequent designers, instructors, and so on? In view of these concerns, there are two purposes of this chapter:

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  To provide a critical analysis of different design decisions that are pertinent for the use and implementation of IMS-LD, including: (a) the questions of boundaries, granularity, and details of the design; (b) the modularity and reusability of smaller learning objects within larger learning objects; (c) sufficient and necessary conditions of a successful reuse of a learning design; (d) the usefulness of detail in the design and reuse of learning designs; and (e) particulars of mapping of activities through IMS-LD.

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  To provide a four-layer evaluation model for determining the quality of IMS-LD design. These four layers are: (1) syntax and grammar; (2) best design approaches to model a certain activity; (3) how accurate is the model representing what the learning design was; and (4) how well the models match sound theories or evidence-based research. These two purposes aim to reflect on the usefulness of IMS-LD as a communicative device to share and communicate learning design issues, including the variety of different ways to design the same instructional activity.

This chapter describes the experience developed over a year-long project in which best practice, theory-based, and evidence-based learning designs were formally described with IMS-LD. The presented arguments will be illustrated with a variety of designs, modeled from theories and activities, including behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist models, problem-based learning, and lesson plans from the area of K–12 education.