TLSWG - Teaching & Learning Strategies Working Group

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LETSI Teaching & Learning Strategies Working Group (LETSI TLSWG)

The charter of Teaching and Learning Strategies Working Group (TLSWG) is to gather requirements related to teaching and learning from a large group of practicing instructional designers and educators. These instruction-related requirements will be used by the LETSI (Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability) community to guide the technical development of SCORM 2.0. Under the current version of SCORM, many forms of instruction are difficult to implement. The purpose of the TLSWG is to provide input on teaching and learning so that SCORM 2.0 will support and facilitate a wide variety of teaching and learning strategies.

The Working Group focus is to answer three primary questions:

What do Instructional System Designers want to do?
How would instructional designers design SCORM-based instruction if there were no technical limitations?
What do instructional desigers need to enable them to do this?

First Requirements Gathering Session

The ID+SCORM meeting took place in Provo, Utah on Feb 21-22, 2008. Meeting participants included a large number of individuals who are engaged in Instructional System Design on a daily basis. This wiki is designed to record the major findings and discussion points of the meeting. Participants with additional input from the meeting should contact jhaynes@i-a-i.com.

Anyone interested in joing the TLSWG should contact info@letsi.org, jhaynes@i-a-i.com; or nina.deibler@si-intl.com.

Notes from session in Provo:

Styles of Instruction

eLearning can be customized for individuals, groups or teams of learners. Groups may consist of individuals performing in clusters or extended social networks. Teams are generally characterized by harmonious performance across multiple learners to achieve a unified objective.

Individual eLearning instruction can take a variety of forms, including intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), just-in-time performance support, simulations, games and guided instruction.

Research is needed to determine when self-guided or guided instruction is most appropriate, and tools provided to the learner to be able to control the level of guidance during instruction.

The SCOs (Shareable Content Objects) that form the basis of SCORM may not be the answer to many of the open questions. It's important to consider whether "content" is key within an instructional design framework. Key concepts to consider are the Tabula Rasa model, and the dichotomy between the Cartesian orientation and constructionist models.

Potentially useful tools/features

Teacher - technology continuum: envisioning a program of blended learning with varying amounts of control, delivery, etc. among teachers and technology
Effectiveness of enterprise intervention: a feedback look that evaluates elements of instruction (lessons, assessment items, etc) and gives designers this feedback enabling them to improve the products
Integrate survey data concerning effectiveness: collect data from students that is part of a feedback loop to designers/developers

Authoring Tools

Authoring tools that support SCORM need to be able to provide a variety of features to support instructional design including:

an intuitive interface
templates for content creation, assessment and sequencing
tools for knowledge capture and transfer
the ability to talk to repositories and knowledge sources such as Google, and built examples using Instructional Design language.
providing multiple levels of authoring in order to support the variety of roles involved in creating eLearning (Instructional Designers, subject matter experts, teachers...)
development of content with multiple types of beneficiaries.
supporting the develoment of assessment materials and the ability to capture performance data.

Simulation and Games

Better authoring tools are needed to facilitate the development of simulations and serious games. Tools are necessary to make simulations and games responsive to the learner, to provide for easy updating of the material, and to automate remediation interventions. Currently, much of this work needs a lot of programming knowledge, and tools to facilitate these tasks would significantly improve development.

Delivery Methods and Devices

SCORM needs to support a larger variety of delivery methods, including short bursts of instruction, podcasts, and PDA or mobile-based instruction. Support for alternate forms of delivery needs to be balanced against the need to maintain a strong commitment to learning principles and direct delivery, including delivery with little to no connectivity (including print). Learning needs to be technology agnostic, separating the learning from the technological delivery mechanism.

The delivery method needs to support maintenance of learner profiles and preferences, a reach-back mechanism, and careful control of learner accomplishment outside of the LMS.

Assessment

SCORM needs to provide wider support for assessment.

Assessment needs to include provision for different types of certification based on different types of data, process assessment, diagnostic information and feedback.

Multiple choice items can only provide a low to medium level of assesment; effective assessment will allow other, more complex measures.

In particular, language learning requires less constrained types of interactivity, such as free text answers and essays with automatic assessment.

SCORM needs to allow students to focus on learning what they don't know (and allow instructors to be able to track what students do and do not know) through more elaborate data tracking. One example of the this might be an error misconception matrix.

Support for more effective assessment should include:

Measuring interactive decision-making and making fine judgements (such as those required by language learning)
Assessment predictive quality
Answer and distractor analysis
Adaptive testing (discrete point tests)
More flexible tracking and reporting
Tools for report generation
Reporting by SCO, item, and the context in which instruction was delivered
Ratings for peer participation
Support for "Just Enough" instruction: efficient instruction

SECOND REQUIREMENTS GATHERING SESSION (added 5/20/2008)

The Second Requirements Gathering Session was held at the Medbiquitous Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD, USA on May 13, 2008. Meeting participants included a large number of individuals who are engaged in Instructional System Design, competency management, and assessment for healthcare professionals. This wiki is designed to record the major findings and discussion points of the meeting. Participants with additional input from the meeting should contact nina.deibler@si-intl.com.

Anyone interested in joing the TLSWG should contact info@letsi.org, jhaynes@i-a-i.com; or nina.deibler@si-intl.com.

Technical Support

Submanifest. Same manifest in any level of detail. Simple and elegant framework.
Accepting web services within a SCO - allow fluency and efficiency within model.
Easy way to create throw away transitions between SCOs.
Data model that allows more than one score.
Adaptive learning model.
User defined data model.
Improved navigation. Share data across SCOs, inputs and outputs from each SCO.
Performance support, making it easier to access. Extracting content from SCOs or using SCOs.
Enterprise systems integration.
Extend communication of LMS with SCORM. Now just a score. Need performance patterns that can be interpreted - expected performance vs. actual performance. Use for assessment of learning objective achievement.
Validation tools for learning objects. LO report data that validates the instructional integrity or expected outcomes (are objectives being achieved)
Integrate SCORM with point of care learning

Documentation and Best Practices

Improved user friendly documentation. Setting up of question types and mastery level could be better described. Good use cases, good examples.
Needs to be more understandable to the executive/dean/instructional design community
Learner model - adaptive learning.
Look at modes of learning
Community of best practices for instructional design. Need to modify instructional design tenets to make content modular and reusable. Tools don't support. Trial and error currently. Some instructional strategies are used over and over -need to define them.
What other people are doing that is successful.

Assessments

Good assessment practices - how will you report the characteristics of an assessment?
What is the output of SCORM for data sets that can be used for assessment?
How do we assess outcomes?
How do we integrate using virtual patients for assessment? What data is captured?
How do we specify what we want to assess - specific competencies?
Accrediting agencies. Do we need to rethink how we educate practitioners? What data you collect and how it is interpreted?

Collaboration

Accommodate collaborative work, team generating something new, how that is reported back to LMS
Identify the roles people play in the context of a team, their level of engagement, time on task, what they contributed to the team/activity.

Competency Support

Competency maps as one.
Being able to integrate with aggregation rollups. Link up to standardized competency frameworks.
An open standard for bringing in metadata or taxonomy - standard competency
Weighting competencies/assessment items.
Having LMS record different competency variables. How much time - where they ended up. Path through the content.
Lifelong portfolio - needs to feed into.

Content Markup and Context

DITA
Support for snippets - smaller portions of reusable content within a SCO. Information objects. Like DITA.
Content markup language. Like DITA.
Personal learning preferences for visual display. Lists vs. mind map. Rich elements with content behind them. (ex Grokker and Visual Thesaurus)
Semantic web, content vs. context
How do you maintain the meaning of things when they are moved, sometimes internationally? What do we mean by context?
Need to be careful of unintended consequences of combining different objects, using for wrong purpose (need to specify purpose well)

Metadata

What if you could use metadata to generate mind map? See what you are doing and how it is related to those things around you.
Extend SCORM metadata with context.
Web service of SCO using metadata to validate against psychometric properties
How do you classify - who wrote, where and why they did it. (ex - abortion legal in one country but not another)?
How can you label so that they are understood? Important for assessment, too.

Wizards

Fold in more popular instructional design models. Theoretical models - wizards to automate production.
Fluency and efficiency in a process.

Other (Intelligent Tutoring Systems)

Several layers - lowest support activity, support monitoring , 3 provide teaching control, 4 learning management, more high granularity
Monitoring - define what is possible - outcome of activities and how to interpret (competencies, knowledge, skills) - can be passive and active. Rough layering
Teaching control - learning objectives, assessment, learning activities mapped to objectives, can plan what to do to achieve specific objectives. Ex - virtual patient model, no feedback. Next layer - expert activity. Compare your own activity with expert - measure your performance. Judge competency level. Map result to assessment. Outcome measurement and competency assessment. System makes decision on what to do next to address gaps (third level).