Supporting teachers: the development and evaluation of a learning design toolkit

The contributors are currently involved in a JISC/NSF funded digital libraries project, DialogPlus, in which teaching staff at two universities in the UK and two in the USA are collaborating to share elearning resources in the subject domains of Physical, Environmental and Human Geography. At the heart of the DialogPlus project is the notion of a 'nugget' or learning activity. In order to support teaching staff in designing and sharing learning activities, the authors have developed an online Learning Design Toolkit. Three main strands underpin our approach: Research, understand and apply what is going on in the learning design field, particularly evolving standards in the areas of sharing digital resources, interoperability, searching, re-purposing, permissions.Work closely with teaching colleagues to analyse their methods, when creating or re-purposing resources, and be guided by their requirements.Enshrine good practice within the toolkit, such that it will guide and support teachers as they create, modify, and share teaching and learning resources.Taxonomies for tools and resources have been developed based on Laurillard's five principal media forms. Account has been taken of other work on pedagogical vocabularies, for example that of the UK's Learning & Teaching Portal Project. Toolkit attributes have been compared to learning object metadata standards including IMS, SCORM and the UK's LOM Core. A prototype toolkit has been developed and is currently being trialled by researchers and teaching staff