4. IMS Learning Design

IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) is not a tool or environment, but a specification that provides a model for developing learning objects and VLEs. IMS LD describes tasks and activities, their assignment to roles, and the flow of activities that constitute a course module or lesson known as “Unit of Learning” (UoL). The specification consists of three documents (http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/):

- the XML Binding Document,

- the Information Model, and

- the Best Practice Guide

The XML Binding Document is a technical document detailing how IMS LD elements are represented in XML. The Information Model presents the vocabulary of and the functional relationships between the concepts, the different IMS LD elements and the set of runtime behaviors that delivery systems must implement. The Best Practice Guide presents some use cases that represent various types of learning scenarios as a way of informing teachers that want to create course modules and lessons with tools based on IMS LD.

IMS LD grew out from work done at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) that began to develop the Educational Modelling Language (EML) in 1998. The origin of EML was to develop a semantic notation for complete units of study to be used in net-based learning. The concept of “unit of study” is the smallest unit that provides a learning situation for students. It cannot be decomposed into smaller parts without losing its educational meaning. A whole study program, a course, course module or a lesson; they are all examples of units of study. This implies, according to Koper (2001), that content material such as videos, images and exercises cannot be isolated from the educational context in which they are used. Based on educational research in the fields of learning psychology and instructional design, the EML team created a meta-model that could express commonalities between different types of learning. The meta-model contains four packages:

1) The learning model,

2) The unit of study model,

3) The domain model and

4) Theories of learning and instruction.

The learning model describes how learners learn based on commonalities between learning theories. Based on axioms on how learners learn and act, the learning model raises questions concerning the kinds of activities learners carry out when learning, and aspects of motivation and results (Koper, 2001 p. 11).

The unit of study model represents aspects that a learning designer has to take into account when designing a unit of study. Roles, learning objectives, prerequisites, learner characteristics, learning domain, learning context and assessment are all considered important aspects.

The domain model represents the characteristics of the subject domain (e.g. mathematics, history etc.). Different domains embody different cultures for learning and have their own way of dealing with knowledge and skills.

Together, these four packages form a meta-model (Figure 2). Important aspects identified are learning objectives, roles (both learners and staff), activities and environments (containing services and content material).

At the same time as EML was being developed, IMS worked on a number of e-learning specifications, mainly targeting support processes for learning rather than the learning process itself. By early 2001, IMS had reached the point where it recognised the need for a specification that addressed the description of learning processes and set up the Learning Design Working Group. It had an ambitious scope that could only be met in a reasonable timescale if it was based on existing work. EML was submitted to the Working Group in the second quarter of 2001. EML was a very complete and mature specification, focused on the entire learning process and was thus complementary to the specifications developed by IMS (Olivier & Tattersall, 2004 pp. 21-22). The IMS LD working group dropped the content specification for marking up materials used in the learning process, and extensions for multimedia, assessments and learner interaction with the runtime system, but the meta-model were kept and is currently the data model of education in IMS LD.

Figure 2: EML pedagogical meta-model

IMS LD’s concept of a learning module, lesson or course is called “Unit of Learning” (UoL). A UoL is basically an IMS Content Package where the Organizations element (that defines the structure of the overall learning experience) is IMS LD specific (Figure 3).

Figure 3: IMS LD’s location in an IMS Content Package and structure of IMS LD elements (Olivier & Tattersall, 2004).

IMS LD consists of a set of components that plays together during a method. Key components in IMS LD are roles, activities, activity structures, environments, properties and conditions.

Roles:

In LD there are two predefined roles, a learner role and a staff role. Each one of these roles can be further specialised into sub-roles. For example in a learning scenario students can have different roles. Each role can then be assigned to different activities.

Activities:

In LD activities are associated with a role and they contain the actual instruction for a person in that role. There are two types of activities; learning activities that is directed at a student and aims to achieve a specific competence and support activities that where students supports peer-students or a teacher supports the students.

Activity Structures

are basically aggregated activities that can reference other activity structures, environments and UoLs?.

Environments

are URIs to learning objects and services that can be inside or outside the UoL. Students typically use learning objects when performing an activity, but these objects is not a part of the activity description itself. Services are used to provide facilities that are helpful for completing activities like discussion forums and e-mail systems.

Properties

are containers that can store information such as the progression of a student in a course module such as completed activities and results of tests.

Conditions

enable designers to define rules that govern the behavior of a UoL as a whole and what gets presented to individual roles.

The components express a pedagogical method when they are configured in the method section of IMS LD (Figure 3). Here the role-parts are linked to the different activities and the flow of the activities is created. Metaphorically, IMS LD considers a learning scenario to consist of one or more plays in which there can be one or more acts. The play can be considered a course, a course module or a lesson while the acts specifies which are the activities or activity structures that will be performed and by whom (e.g. a student). During the performance of activities, if learning objects or services are needed, then they will be placed in the environment supporting the activity. Another important part of the method section of IMS LD is conditions that have the form of “If-Then-Else” rules. The “If” part of the condition uses Boolean expressions on properties defined in the component section. Conditions are used to tune the path a student can take through a course module or to personalise a course module against some predefined characteristics. Besides conditions, IMS LD also contains a notifications mechanism for making new activities available. Notifications can be triggered by a change to a property value, the completion of an activity, or a condition that evaluates to true. The notification can make a new activity for a role or it can send a message to a student on behalf of another student. Notifications can be useful if the input for an activity depends on the outcome of another activity (Olivier & Tattersall, 2004).

These component and method sections of IMS LD have been divided into three parts:

- Level A where the core components such as roles, activities and environments are defined as well as the core method parts of play, acts and role-parts.

- Level B where properties and conditions are introduced and,

- Level C where notifications are included

This division of IMS LD into three parts has been created to make it easier for tool developers to conform to the specification when they develop their authoring tool or VLE.

Currently there are only a few tools that are able to reach level C of IMS LD and one of them comes from the the RELOAD project that has developed both an editor and a player for editing and running level C compatible UoLs?.

RELOAD (Reusable eLearning Object Authoring & Delivery) is a JISC funded project (X4L strand B) developing tools to facilitate the use of emerging Learning Technology Interoperability specifications such as those produced by ADL and IMS. The editor has been developed at the University of Bolton. It approaches editing from a “bottom-up” approach. When developing a course module using a “bottom-up” approach, the designers have to do preparation beforehand (e.g. modelling user interaction using UML). Then the designers can fill in the forms provided by RELOAD editor (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Linking activities to role-parts in the method section of the RELOAD editor to create a LD.

All the physical files that will be included in the UoL have to be created in advance. Then these files can be linked to activities and, when this is done, the designers are able to edit the physical files using RELOAD’s built-in text editor. It supports editing conditions in such a way that the representation structure of expressions and actions exactly reflects the element structure of IMS LD specification.

The RELOAD editor is an example of tree-based authoring tools where the elements of IMS LD are presented as a tree structure. An interface is provided for users to navigate through the tree and to enter values for the elements.

Other IMS LD authoring tools adopting a tree-based approach are ALFANET and CopperAuthor?. ALFANET is a EU project that aims to develop new methods and services for active and adaptive learning. In ALFANET, IMS LD is used to represent learning scenarios for supporting personalization. The menu buttons in the tool are organized as a hierarchical structure according to IMS LD element structure. It provides basic support for authors to fill the forms for defining elements at Level A. CopperAuthor? allows designers to construct and navigate the structure of the edited learning design. The generic information of each element can be entered in the cells of the table.

There are also graphical oriented tools that use nodes and arrows to represent IMS LD. An example is MOTPlus (Paquette, 2004), which is developed at Tele-university in Montreal. It enables users to navigate in and construct hypertext documents that make up a learning design. A learning design represented as hypertext documents can be exported as IMS LD XML files.

The RELOAD developer team at University of Bolton have also developed a Learning Design Player (Figure 5). It is based on and uses the Coppercore Learning Design Engine developed by the Open University of the Netherlands. The Coppercore Learning Design Engine is a reference implementation of IMS LD, which means that this implementation should support all the features of IMS LD. The RELOAD editor is an improvement from the CopperCore? player because it has a better user interface. One drawback of both CopperCore? and RELOAD is that they do not have any meta-management of users. This means that results of a student in one course module in the RELOAD player is not connected to other results that same student would have in other course modules.

Figure 5: The interface of the RELOAD Player where UoLs? are presented.