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An Open E-Learning Specification for Multiple Learners and Flexible Pedagogies
Abstract
Significant investments have been made by universities, colleges, distance learning providers, and corporate training departments in the area of e-learning. Moving from early use of static HTML pages providing course details, the use of the Internet as a delivery technology for education and training is now commonplace, with both distance and presential learning providers exploiting e-learning in their offerings. A standards-based IT infrastructure is in place in educational institutions around the world, simplifying the delivery of e-learning courses and opening the doors to mainstream, largescale, Web-based education (Brusilovsky & Vassileva, 2003). Many different virtual learning environments (VLEs) exist (Everett, 2002), including significant contributions from the open source community (Dougiamas, 2004; Sakai, 2005). Above the underlying IT standards rest a significant number of e-learning standards, specifications, and reference models (IMSCP, 2003; Loidl Reisinger & Paramythis, 2003; Wisher & Fletcher, 2004), designed to improve the interoperability between systems and remove islands of e-learning. These infrastructural changes have been mirrored by developments in the area of learning objects (Littlejohn, 2003; Wiley, 2002). The learning objects movement is based upon the idea that reusable units of content can be created, shared, and reused between different communities, and is viewed as a solution to the significant production costs associated with the development of high-quality learning resources—see Sloep (2004) for a discussion of this issue. Critics of the learning objects movement have expressed their uneasiness with e-learning as page turning that leads to “static, fossilized, dead [content], low learner motivation and engagement, impersonal and isolating environments” (Stacey, 2003). This debate has brought pedagogy in the e-learning community to the fore. How should different groups of learners best be taught? What does existing educational theory have to teach e-learning, and how could the results of this work be brought into e-learning systems? How could new information and communication technology developments, particularly in the area of collaboration and cooperation, be brought into e-learning offerings? How could ongoing R&D in the area of pedagogy and e-learning be more easily brought together and compared? This article describes the IMS learning design specification (IMSLD, 2003). IMSLD is an open specification, freely downloadable, maintained by an international consortium of universities, system vendors, and learning providers. The specification provides a counter to the trend toward designing for lone-learners reading from screens. Instead, it guides staff and educational developers to start not with content, but with learning activities and the achievement of learning objectives.
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