digital lifeboat

I have been working on a number of design documents looking at the software design and the instructional design for my project.

It seems that designing a Moodle course does not sit fully in any of the familiar software design methodologies. I am looking at a hybrid of Software Prototyping and Rapid applications developement, married to some form of Instructional design methodology.

It would make an interesting research project in itself building up a rationale which can be justified for how to go about the design. Figuring out the learning objectives is straightforward. The tricky bit is mapping out a learning sequence before diving in to build it so that I can document my decisions clearly and illustrate any itterations to the design.

I have found a couple of  sources for describing a sequence of learning activities such as course construction. They appear to have potential for my project.

Searching for applications of learning design related to Moodle course building tapped into the e4inovation blog post Moodling about.

On from there to look at the  JISC funded OU research programme the Open University Learning Design Initiative.

http://ouldi.open.ac.uk/index.html

Happily their ongoing research has already borne fruit in the form of a learning design planning tool CompendiumLD which I will be experimenting with.

I the course of preparing for a recent presentation came across Guidelines to construct a Learning Design Sequence Oliver (1999) at The Australian Universities Teaching Committee Learning Designs Project

http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/learn_design.htm

From the project overview-

Thus, for the scope of this project, a learning design comprises three key elements: the content or resources learners interact with, the tasks or activities learners are required to perform, and the support mechanisms provided to assist learners to engage with the tasks and resources.

I like the way Oliver’s Model uses a Venn diagram to explore the interactions between the content tasks and supports, and also the more linear flow charting method which clearly helps to conceptualise what is going on over the progress of a course