MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

I was recently invited to attend a three day meeting to inaugurate three communities of practice under the banner of an EU project called UNFOLD (see http://www.unfold-project.net:8085/UNFOLD ).UNFOLD aims to support the adoption of open eLearning standards for multiple learners and flexible pedagogies, and three communities of practice have been formed to help achieve these project aims.

The Learning and Teaching Providers, Learning Designers and Software Developers Communities of Practice were launched in Barcelona in early September with 35 participants.

Anyone can register on the UNFOLD site to take part in these communities,- which are not unlike the CETIS special interest groups, with which you may be familiar. You don’t have to be very technically minded to take part, since the project, which is being run collaboratively by CETIS, the Open University of the Netherlands, and Universidad Pompeu Fabra, is interested in capturing the use of electronic learning resources (sometimes called reusable learning objects) in their pedagogical contexts.

LTSN-01 has been involved with the ACETS project (http://www.acets.ac.uk) since its inception, and where we have been concerned with trying to capture use cases of the learning and teaching contexts in which teachers use electronic resources – to date we have collected 4 full use cases which describe in detail how electronic resources have been employed in particular learning and teaching contexts. The project is working in two areas of interest to the broad health and social care educational communities, namely anatomy and communication skills.

I attended the UNFOLD meeting with my ACETS hat on (I am contracted to work on this project as part of my everyday work with LTSN-01), as an observer. Having listened to presentations from CETIS and OUNL representatives, it quickly became apparent that the ACETS tools and processes, which we have developed, to try to capture pedagogical narratives, might be of interest to the learning and teaching providers and learning designers communities of practice.

The many opportunities for networking presented during the course of the meeting meant that by day three I had been asked to present something about ACETS. There was a lot of interest shown in the qualitative approach that ACETS is using, and it seems likely that there will be further collaboration with the UNFOLD partners in utilising the resulting semi-structured use cases to help in the development of more technical tools to support the uptake of the IMS Learning Design specification.

There is a lot of scope for UK medical education people to get involved with the UNFOLD project – the CoP leaders are friendly and approachable people, who are really interested in getting real learning designs and narratives which they can work with to test out the IMS Learning Design specification (http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/index.cfm ).

The IMS Learning Design specification supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online learning. Rather than attempting to capture the specifics of many pedagogies, it does this by providing a generic and flexible language. This language is designed to enable any number of pedagogical approaches to be expressed. The language was originally developed at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL). In ACETS we have been using the Best Practice and Implementation Guide for Learning Design to inform the simple qualitative tools we have designed to elicit statements of pedagogical context from our project exemplifiers.

We are at an early stage of capturing full use cases in ACETS, but we hope to have around 20 such exemplars by the end of the project in 18 months time. It seems from this initial UNFOLD meeting that there is a lot of synergy between the ACETS project and some of the work going on in UNFOLD CoPs, which we hope can exploit to the advantage of both projects.

We very much hope that by collecting detailed use cases which capture learning and teaching contexts we can contribute something of worth to the UNFOLD project, which they can then use to help develop tools for next generation learning environments which can automatically capture learning designs and pedagogical patterns. In return we hope to disseminate widely the novel approach taken in eliciting narratives of learning and teaching scenarios. Anecdotal evidence to date from project exemplifiers seems to indicate that the process has an added and unforeseen benefit in enabling teaching practitioners to analyse and reflect on their own educational practice. The funding from the ACETS project gives the time and space to do this. We hope at a later stage in the project that we might be able to ascertain any added benefit to students in their use and consumption of the electronic learning resources.