Practitioners are faced with a potentially bewildering array of tools and technologies to support learning and teaching. However, “while it is clear that technologies are having an increasing impact on institutions … it is equally apparent that their potential for enabling new styles of learning is not yet being realised” (Conole et al., 2005, p. 3). Practitioners designing and creating learning activities need to make a complex set of inter-related decisions. Examples of the questions they ask themselves, and others, include:
Which tools should I use to promote dialogue between students – chat, a discussion forum, video conferencing?
How can I set up an activity to encourage students to collaborate on a shared problem?
What is the best way to create a collaborative shared space of resources?
Some practitioners are confused by the ever-expanding range of tools and theories and need support in deciding which might be appropriate for a particular learning activity. As a result, in recent years there has been considerable interest in gathering examples of good practice and providing scaffolds, or design support, to aid practitioners as they create new learning activities. However, defining case studies of good practice and articulating the steps and processes involved in learning design is far from trivial. Our aim was to create a toolkit which would guide teachers through the decision making process of creating learning activities. This built on previous work (Conole & Oliver, 1998; Conole et al., 2001), with the intention that the learning activity toolkit would be designed to present relevant information to the user on a needs basis. The output would be an outline design of a learning activity and the key associated components. This outline would be held in the toolkit database so that it could be searched by other users.