JISC

Start date: 1 May 2006

End date: 31 October 2007

Funding programme: e-Learning Pedagogy programme

Project website: http://www.ucel.ac.uk/load/

JISC theme(s): e-Learning

Sharing the LOAD: Learning Objectives, Activities and Designs

Sharing the LOAD will synthesise a number of JISC-funded project outputs, tools and other national initiatives in learning content design and reuse to create practitioner-centred templates in order to capture holistic learning designs containing learning activities that support defined learning objectives. These designs will incorporate components from the large pre-existing collection of mature reusable learning objects (RLOs) created and shared by the RLO-CETL community. Practitioners and students will be facilitated in engaging hands-on workshops to experiment with learning design tools and templates and collaboratively create shareable learning designs. Exemplars of the designs will be evaluated for pedagogical effectiveness across a range of subjects by the RLO-CETL community of students and tutors using the RLO-CETL Evaluation toolkit. RELOAD and the WCKER extension tools will be tested for their effectiveness in packaging and managing the resulting content. The designs and templates created by the project will be uploaded to JORUM. The project outputs will be widely disseminated through workshops, the CETL community, at national conferences and internationally through exchange visits and workshops. The outputs will feed into the RLO-CETL common structured framework for the production of quality assured RLOs compliant with international standards ensuring long-term sustainability.

Aims and Objectives

The project aims to capture a series of “real-world” learning designs through a review of existing mature reusable content to construct a learning design taxonomy and also through practitioner-focused workshops. These designs will then be piloted in three subject areas to create learning object exemplars. The exemplars will be evaluated for pedagogical effectiveness across a range of subjects by the RLO-CETL community of students and tutors using the RLO-CETL Evaluation Toolkit. The toolkit evaluates individual learning objects and has been designed to assure consistency across the three RLO-CETL institutions. Each stage will be documented with a full report. The project team will disseminate their findings as widely as possible, through the UCeL and RLO-CETL communities, the wider Design for Learning programme, HE Academy and Subject Centre communities and events, national conferences and international workshops and exchange visits.

Project Methodology

A review and analysis of existing learning objects will identify a number of learning design patterns. Practitioner-based workshops will explore which designs show the most promise for reuse. Exemplars of these designs will be developed as shareable learning design templates. Instantiated with discipline-specific content as web-based learning objects, they will be evaluated for pedagogical effectiveness across a range of subjects by the RLO-CETL community of students and tutors using the RLO-CETL Evaluation toolkit. The project templates will feed into the ongoing RLO-CETL common structured framework for the production of quality assured RLOs compliant with international standards. RLO-CETL is committed to raise awareness of these standards within the CETL community and beyond, thus ensuring sustainability and wide dissemination for the project outputs. UCeL has a large range (>100) of mature RLOs comprising a variety of learning activities that support explicit learning objectives. In addition, RLO-CETL is generating a growing collection of learning objects and components across a broad range of subjects. A review of the designs implicit in these collections will be conducted at the outset of the project and from that a selection will be made of the designs that show the most promise for reuse. RELOAD and the WCKER extension tools will be evaluated for their effectiveness in packaging and managing the resulting content and an analysis will be included in the final report. The designs and templates created by the project will be uploaded to JORUM. The project outputs will be widely disseminated through workshops, the UCeL and CETL communities, at national conferences and internationally through exchange visits and workshops.

Critical success factors will include the effectiveness of the workshops in engaging the community and identifying learning designs; how transferable the learning designs are between different disciplines; the pedagogical effectiveness of the exemplars.

Deliverables

• Review of existing mature reusable content; analysis and report
• Workshop poster templates
• Workshops at Cambridge, Nottingham, London and Oxford
• Practitioners & students exposed to learning design theory and RLO concepts in workshops
• Learning designs captured digitally and archived to website
• Evaluations of workshops
• Baseline survey of practitioners’ level of knowledge; analysis and report
• Learning objects developed from the designs
• Learning designs and templates uploaded to JORUM
• Progress reports with interim findings
• Use and evaluation; analysis and report
• Tools evaluation (RELOAD and WCKER); analysis and report
• Practitioner long-term impact interview; analysis and report
• Final report with recommendations for further work
• Dissemination, national conference submission

Stakeholders

Higher Education Academy & Subject Centres 
RLO-CETL

CETL community
CARET, University of Cambridge 
UCeL community

HE & FE community
SONET group, University of Nottingham