Background to LAMS

It is now clearly understood that a key dimension of education (particularly K-12 schools and Higher Education) is learning which arises from interacting with teachers and peers

LAMS International and LAMS Foundation are both organisations managed by Macquarie University in Sydney Australia (www.mq.edu.au). The LAMS Foundation (www.lamsfoundation.org) is designed to do applied research into the impact and development of LAMS, visit the site for a brief overview.

Beyond Content

E-learning has a well developed approach to the creation and sequencing of content-based, single learner, self-paced learning objects. However, there is little understanding of how to effectively create and deliver sequences of learning activities which involve groups of learners interacting within a structured set of collaborative environments, or how teachers can make these sequences easily re-usable.

It is now clearly understood that a key dimension of education (particularly K-12 schools and Higher Education) is learning which arises from interacting with teachers and peers (rather than simply interacting with content). The lack of a mature approach to sequencing of multi-learner activities is a significant blind spot in e-learning today. This is surprising given that "lesson planning" — the process of determining the sequence of activities to be followed by a teacher and students when studying a topic — is well understood in education, but is mainly absent from e-learning. However, there is a growing body of work addressing this blind spot, based on the concept of "Learning Design". Learning Design provides the first practical ways of describing multi-learner activity sequences and the tools required to support these.

Introducing Learning Design

Learning Design has emerged as one of the most significant recent developments in e-learning. It was the focal topic of Professor Diana Laurillard' September IMS (Kraan, 2002) and December 2002 ASCILITE Keynote addresses (Laurillard, 2002). It has been the subject of a major Australian University Teaching Committee project (Harper & Oliver, 2002) and conference (AUTC, 2002). It is a driving concept behind a growing number of UK initiatives (such as the CETIS Pedagogy Forum, CETIS, 2003a; the Department for Education and Skills "Towards a Unified E-learning Strategy: Consultation Document", 2003; and the JISC X4L "RELOAD" project, CETIS, 2003b) and it is the subject of discussion and/or implementation in a growing number of countries, such as Canada (eg, Downes, 2003) and Spain (eg, Griffiths, 2003).

Central to the uptake of Learning Design is the work of the IMS Global Learning Consortium to develop the IMS Learning Design specification (IMS, 2003), based on the work of the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) on "Educational Modelling Language" (EML — Koper, 2001), a notational language to describe a "meta-model" of instructional design. The OUNL coordinates an international EML/IMS Learning Design implementation group known as the Valkenburg group (2003), and OUNL have recently stated their intention to no longer continue developing EML, but instead focus their energies of the new IMS Learning Design specification (Tattersall, 2003). Hence, the successful implementation of the IMS Learning Design specification has the potential to transform e-learning, and expertise in implementing IMS Learning Design will prove to be a very valuable skill.

While definitions of Learning Design vary, the main elements tend to include greater focus on "context" dimensions of e-learning (rather than simply "content"), a more "activity" based view of e-learning (rather than "absorption"), and greater recognition of the role of "multi-learner" (rather than just single learner) environments. While Learning Design does not exclude single learner, self-paced modes of e-learning, it draws attention to a wider range of collaborative e-learning approaches in addition to single learner approaches. Much of the focus on Learning Design arises from a desire for re-use and adaptation at a level above simply re-using and adapting content objects.

Why Learning Design has failed to catch on so far

Existing approaches to Learning Design suffer from several fundamental problems.

First, they focus too narrowly on one particular discipline area (eg, medicine — see Griffiths, 2003) or style of Learning Design (eg, problem-based learning — see Laurillard, 2002), leading to interesting Learning Designs within a narrow area, but which do not generalise to all educational settings.

Second, the attempts at a more generally applicable approach to Learning Design have been conceptually flawed, particularly as they relate to describing multi-learner activities (eg, AUTC, 2002), hence limiting their ability to generalise to all educational settings.

Third, most Learning Design projects have not separated their conceptual model from the use of technology, and hence the outcomes only relate to e-learning, not any form of learning.

The challenge for Learning Design is to describe a foundational conceptual framework, applicable to all educational settings, which is independent of the mode of delivery (face to face, technology, etc).