Workshop "Crafting didactic materials based on IMS LD:
from Requirements to Evaluation"
Call for participation
Learning technologies provides a wide range of new opportunities for instructional reusability and personalized learning, two basic features needed to face the challenges of the current information society. But those opportunities can not be effectively deployed if there are not available authoring tools to create didactic materials able to support those features and proper environments for their deployment. Didactic materials are any kind of digital (or not digital) elements that assist actors of the teaching/learning process to achieve their objectives [1]. They are herein considered as a conjunction of a set of contents, in form of learning objects, with a pedagogical strategy defined by an instructional design, and they take the form of units of learning based on IMS LD that guides the educational process.
The didactic material creation is a time-consuming, complex and intensive process. This creation process is composed by a set of phases: analysis of requirements, design, development, implementation and evaluation and they can be seen as the different states of material’s life-cycle. Each of theses phases needs a special support and in this workshop we will focus on analysing some issues related to the development and deployment, solutions to solve them and tools or frameworks to support of these two stages of didactic materials.
Nowadays there is available an important number of authoring tools as result of many research approaches to support the development. Among them are worthy to mention: RELOAD, CopperAuthor, Aloha and OLAT QTI Editor. They have in common the successful technical development of materials compliant to learning technology standards and specifications like IMS LD, IMS LOM, IMS QTI or ADL SCORM. The use of those tools represents a step ahead assisting the development of didactic materials and ensuring important material’s features such as interoperability, accessibility and personalization. Unfortunately the design of such tools and the solutions they provide are suitable for a small segment of all the possible intended users: those practitioners with a deep technical understanding of the standards. The aforementioned tools also lack of support to solve important issues arise during the development like how to find most suitable contents, where can be they retrieved from, which are appropriated criteria to select contents, when and how to control the coherence and accuracy of contents? Or how to ensure and check the reusability of the material based on the reusable nature of its components?
Main questions to be addressed
This is a list of some of main topics to address in the workshop.
- How to extend the current authoring tool’s target audience?
- How development methods and their implementations can help to guide creators solving issues arose during development?
- How to automatically or semi-automatically provide materials with appropriated semantic annotations?
- How to control the quality and usability of didactic materials within their development and deployment?
If you think your research interests fall within the scope of this workshop, we will like to know what you do and your contributions will be welcome.
Expected results
The expected results of the workshop are
- The analysis of approaches presented to solve the main questions addressed by the workshop.
- The determination of commonalities among those approaches and feasibility of their future integration into an extended development framework.
- The proposal to extend the network of researchers interested in this area.
More information about Submission procedures >>
Target audience
The workshop is not exclusive to, but is meant especially for the following categories of participants:
- Developers, educators, pedagogical experts, content providers and students interested in the design and development of authoring tool that address aforementioned issues associated the development of IMS-based didactic materials.
- Researchers who had explore or want to explore new approaches to solve those and other issues associated to the development.
- Students and educators with minimal technical background interested in the life-cycle of IMS-based didactic materials, and especially in their development.
Workshop Organization
The workshop will last for 2 and ½ hours. Speakers will give a presentation of 15 min including the time for a round of questions. The last 20 min of the session will be devoted to a general debate about the presented approaches.