Pedagogical Patterns and Learning Design: When Two Worlds Cooperate César Olavo de Moura Filho1 , Alain Derycke2 1
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Laboratoire Trigone, Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, France Lab. de Redes e Sistemas Distribuídos, Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica do Ceará, Brazil
[email protected];
[email protected]
Abstract The creation of new pedagogical designs are some of the next challenges for the future of the Technology-enhanced Learning. This article examines two different ways of describing pedagogical designs: Pedagogical Patterns and Learning Designs. We argue that they are two complementary approaches that theoretically have so much in common, while being disparate in practice. Yet we consider that the drawing together of these communities can only be of benefit to each and, in an effort to narrow this gap, we suggest the advantages from a mixed approach and illustrate in a practical example how to migrate from a Pedagogical Pattern to an IMS Learning Design. Keywords: Learning design, Pedagogical patterns, IMS-LD, Design Patterns.
1. INTRODUCTION The learning community seems to be betting on the future of e-learning. Undisputable pieces of evidence for this claim include: universities all over the world rushing to acquire the latest LMSs; a huge –and fiercely fought for- marketplace for training delivery being created; students in demand of continuous, best-fitted, everyplace learning; enterprises assuming more and more often the role of trainer for their employees; or researchers releasing a myriad of standard specifications, aiming at regulating different aspects of the learning environment. One of these standard specifications is the IMS Learning Design (IMS, 2003a), which accounts for the shift in the e-learning focus from content to process –or activity. In fact, content issues (and here by content we mean learning objects) have distracted and polarized attention of the e-learning community for a while now. But the hype surrounding them seems to be receding as learning-object technology goes mainstream, leaving space for other important issues to occupy the center stage of the cutting edge. Both academy and industry are now mature enough to begin turning their attention not only to what to learn, but also to how to learn. They are “moving toward being more concerned with runtime issues, interactions and activities”. With this regard, we believe that new pedagogical techniques are some of the next challenges for the future of e-learning and that creating a repository of useful educational approaches is a necessary - but non trivial - task. As e-learning tools start to adopt IMS-LD, users will look for generic templates embodying certain pedagogical techniques, in the hope that they can then be adapted to meet specific learning objectives and outcomes. Of course that for them to find a given template, it is necessary that somebody else has already created it and made it available to others. That is where the task of creating new and tailored learning designs comes into play. However, the problem here is that the IMS-LD specification is not a simple language and using it to develop even elementary scenarios might be an unreachable undertaking for those who effectively create the learning strategy in the first place: instructors, teachers, pedagogues, etc. The Learning Design Best Practice Guide (IMS, 2003b) describes some steps to be taken when creating a Unit of Learning (Unity of Learning or UoL is an IMS-LD jargon for a lesson, a course, a seminar or any other learning/teaching “unity”), beginning with an analysis phase, where the didactical scenario is captured in the form of a narrative - an online learning version of the classroombased lesson plan. Next, a UML activity diagram would be created based on this narrative and this, in
César Olavo de Moura Filho, Alain Derycke
turn, would give rise to an XML file describing the educational scenario. Finally, the XML file would be wrapped together with resources in a content package. This procedure is far from obvious for those people not so tech-savvy and therefore may be a hindrance for the creation of new IMS-LD compatible scenarios. On the other hand, the patterns community has long provided a completely different approach: the Pedagogical Patterns (PPP, 2001). However, by being a textual representation, pedagogical patterns, unlike IMS-LD XML files, cannot - and should not – be automated. Their main strength is to enable the description of pedagogical strategies that does not stray far from the way teaching practitioners regularly document their practices in classroom or in virtual courses (using lesson plans, for example). That is why they need a companion notation that enables the automation of the teaching approach. Thus, we propose in this article to bring together these two “worlds” that theoretically have so much in common, while being disparate in practice. We argue that Pedagogical Patterns and Learning Design can work together, in a process that begins by eliciting best-practice from an instructor, including its documentation via a pedagogical pattern form, and ends with a Unit of Learning being executed in a computer program. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: next two sections discuss patterns and pedagogical patterns within a context relevant to this paper and the Learning Design specification, respectively. Next, Section 4 lists some contributions that the Pedagogical Patterns approach can offer to the IMS-LD community and Section 5 describes what benefits the Pedagogical Patterns communities can draw from the IMS-LD technology. Section 6 describes, trough a practical example, how to create an IMS Learning Design from a Pedagogical Pattern. The final section presents our concluding remarks.
2. PATTERNS AND PEDAGOGICAL PATTERNS “What's new here is that there's nothing new here. Patterns are about what works. Patterns give us a way to talk about what works.” Brian Foote, pattern writer A pattern is about best-practice. In other words, it is about a certain class of problem paired with a type of solution that has endured the test of time, proving itself to be a good -and often insightful- way of tackling that problem. Once a pattern is elicited, what remains is to write it down in any of the many standard forms and publish it, enabling others to read, apply and - why not? - improve and redistribute it. It was Christopher Alexander, in the book “A Pattern Language: towns, buildings, construction” (Alexander et al., 1977) who first proposed the idea of patterns, providing a language of 253 patterns, for describing buildings, and how they should be designed: “Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution. The pattern is, in short, at the same time a thing, which happens in the world, and the rule which tells us how to create that thing, and when we must create it. It is both a process and a thing; both a description of a thing which is alive, and a description of the process which will generate that thing” In his turn, Appleton (1999) explains that patterns are useful because they: • • • • • •
Solve "real world" problems; Capture domain expertise; Document design decisions and rationale; Reuse the wisdom and experience of master practitioners; Convey expert insight to novices; Form a shared vocabulary for problem-solving discussion.
Viljamaa (1995), on the other hand, explains how patterns are related to other design formalisms: “Patterns are related to but different from: paradigms, idioms, principles, heuristics, architectures, frameworks, role-models. You could say that a paradigm is a very abstract pattern, or style of work
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that can be followed consistently throughout the system. Idiom is a language specific typical way of using and combining elementary building blocks. Principle is an invariant that can hold globally, or “always”; it could be a synonym for “design rule.” Heuristics aid decision making, without claiming absolute goodness for the actions suggested. Heuristics could be used to choose among multiple alternative patterns. Architecture refers to the total structure of an application, possibly described by the multiple patterns involved. Patterns have been called “micro-architectures.” Frameworks refer to collections of concrete classes working together to accomplish a given parameterizable task. Rolemodels describe a single coordinated collaboration among multiple participants (the framework classes can serve in multiple roles simultaneously). Role-models may be the closest thing to the formalization of patterns.” Alexander also proposed the concept of Pattern Language. Whereas patterns can be a good solution for fine grained problems, linking related patterns can also be useful in addressing more complex processes in a step-by-step approach. This set of patterns working together is called a Pattern Language. Only more recently has the scope of the pattern languages expanded to include domains as diverse as group work, software design, human computer interaction, education, etc. Pedagogical Patterns are targeted at education; they seek to find best practice of teaching. According to Bergin (2001): “The intent [of pedagogical patterns] is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge. Presenting this information in a coherent and accessible form can mean the difference between every new instructor needing to relearn what is known by senior faculty and easy transference of knowledge of teaching within the community“ Although widespread in the software industry, the use of patterns is still only nascent in the educational field. Whereas software developers make regular use of mature patterns, the educational community as a whole is still far from including patterns in their everyday tool-box. Nonetheless, education is a domain where professionals are not seldom evaluated - and drafted - by their technical skills in areas other than education (for example, good programmers are assumed to be good programming teachers, and so on). The problem is that knowing the subject matter is very different from knowing how to teach it (Eckstein, 2002). In such cases, taking advantage of experienced instructors’ know-how, by using pedagogical patterns, can be of great help. Pedagogical Pattern Form Just like patterns in general, the pedagogical patterns do not have one single petrified form, but instead, different authors use - slightly – different standard forms, by adding or omitting some optional elements - as Grace Hopper once said, "the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from". However, the “core” elements are always present, although they can have different names in different authors. First we have the metadata-type elements –like author, date, version, also known as –, important to label the pattern. Then we have the four core elements – title, problem, context and solution - which alone account for the real identity of the pattern. Take one of them out and you won’t have a pattern, change one of them and you’ll have another pattern. Lastly, we have the optional elements that add features and grace to a pattern, making it more expressive and useful: forces, examples, related patterns, contra indications, resources, consequences are some of them. Pedagogical Patterns for e-learning One aspect that is worth noting is that most existing pedagogical patterns were conceived for classroom situations (in-person classes, seminars, etc), where instructor and students have a rich interactive situation. For a non-exhaustive list of pedagogical patterns, please refer to the site www.pedagogicalpatterns.org. So, there is a vast field to be worked on, serving to adapt existing patterns and to propose new ones applied to the online world. In this sub-domain particularly, pedagogical patterns could benefit from closing ranks with the learning design world, which face about the same problem, since they will have a big job to transform existing lesson plans made for classroom situations into UoLs.
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3. LEARNING DESIGN The recent history of e-learning applications has been dominated by a plethora of content management systems (CMS), which provide a means for managing content, groups and services (chat, email, polling, etc). In CMSs, all those resources are usually "patched" in the end-user interface, and are accessible - usually via links - according to some previous configuration by an administrator/instructor. However, CMSs fail miserably when it comes to support the dynamic part of any learning activity. That is to say, it is not possible to specify a sequence of activities that have to be accomplished by learners so as to meet predefined learning objectives, e.g. according to some pedagogical guidance, since the structure of a course in CMSs is based on content. If there is some pedagogical strategy that the teacher, for example, wants to put into practice, then all he can do is to write a text with these guidelines and to have it read by the students (who supposedly would abide by them). This limitation gave origin to the IMS-Learning Design specification, a technology that enables instructors to describe not only content but also the instructional approach associated with their content in a machine readable way. In fact, Learning Design is both a field of theory and a technical specification that has recently appeared to provide a solution to the above mentioned CMSs shortcomings. It does so by wrapping the content layer with a new layer that provides a range of capabilities enabling the learning designer to describe a complete learning scenario, including not only content, but also the activities that will be performed by learners and instructors in a way that can be executed in computers. And this is exactly the major contribution of Learning Design to the e-learning field: to enable course creators to specify, not only what to learn, but also how to learn. It represents, therefore, a further step vis-à-vis the content-centered approach of before. As a field of theory, learning design is a spin-off from Instructional Design field of theory, with a different name (perhaps in an effort to dissociate its image from that conveyed by old CBT applications, in which learning meant accessing chunks of strictly sequenced content). Learning design’s main focus, on the other hand, is on learning activities and how to model them. As Koper and Olivier (2004) put it: “A lot of learning does not come from knowledge resources at all, but stems from the activities of learners solving problems, interacting with real devices, interacting in their social and work situation.” As a technical specification, Learning Design (note the capital letters) is a language promoted by the IMS consortium used for modeling UoLs. It is used to describe learning scenarios using the metaphor of a theatrical script and meant to be executed in standards-based computer systems (called IMS-LD players). This specification allows sequences of learning activities to be expressed in an XML file, and as a result, to be shared, modified, re-used, etc.
4. WHAT PEDAGOGICAL PATTERNS CAN PROVIDE TO IMS-LD Patterns propose solutions to problems that are inseparable from the context in which they appear. So if we say that predefined scenarios, such as jigsaw or problem-based learning, are representative of best-practice within teaching strategies, we have also to provide answers to two other questions: “to which problem?” and “under which circumstances?”. That is to say, in patterns these scenarios are considered preferably as solutions; as such, they require the statement of the problem they come from and their underlying context. You just cannot gloss over the context and provide a solution out of nothing. There are no stand-alone solutions in patterns. Whereas IMS-LD designers tend to develop scenarios for a lesson, a seminar or even a whole course, with pedagogical patterns, a more common approach is to design strategies to address a particular problem. For example we could create pedagogical patterns to cope with unmotivated learners, to get the best of a class where learners have unbalanced background or to teach two subjects requiring each other as a prerequisite (chicken-and-egg problem). But if we are supposed to build a lesson, we should probably chain different patterns up, each one aimed at a specific problem likely to occur during the lesson.
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In other words, pedagogical patterns are good at describing and proposing workarounds to the constraints of learners, instructors or even learning environments. A major assumption is that it is hard to get a student to learn from a course if existing constraints are not tackled. So, if IMS-LD designers tend to “homogenize” user profiles behind “average Joe” roles, patterns are there to remind them to replace “R-Learner” with R_Learner_with_Shortage_of_Time and R_Learner_with_Hearing_Impairment and R_Unfocused_Learner, etc, whenever there are different learning needs, what will probably give rise to different learning paths. As stated in the introduction, the pedagogical pattern is not a competitor to the learning design technology, but rather a companion that serves as a first step in the creation of a learning scenario. There are other proposed alternatives (Griffiths, 2004) to implement these “first steps” in creating a Unity of Learning, to which patterns are no rival either, since patterns can be applied together with any of them. And that is the most significant contribution that pedagogical patterns can bring to learning design: a repository of well-documented (best) practices in education that can feed learning designers constructing UoLs with proven strategies. However, we can suggest other important contributions: •
In section 3, we said that different patterns can be grouped to form a pattern language. According to Coplien (1996), “a pattern language defines a collection of patterns and the rules to combine them into an architectural style.” Thus, making use of relations like uses, refines and conflicts, composite patterns can be created that possess a set of characteristics exceeding those of the individual contributing patterns. Extrapolating from this idea, learning designs implementing patterns could also benefit from such an approach and accordingly be grouped, related, etc, with one another to make a more powerful design.
•
Another strong idea that can be imported from the pattern world is the one of anti-patterns. Perhaps almost as important as creating good designs based on best practices is to avoid traps of “worst practices”, i.e. strategies that should never be tried in a given situation. Pedagogical patterns, as patterns in general, also present the concept of anti-patterns, what enables a learning designer, by consulting a catalog of pedagogical anti-patterns, to save a precious time and avoid lots of to-ing and fro-ing when creating UoLs.
•
More than being just best-practices, patterns are best-practices with a name. In this respect, the title of the pedagogical pattern can act as a handle and make up a vocabulary that practitioners and designers can use to easily express sometimes complex strategies, practices, etc. One handle may be worth a thousand words, facilitating the communication among professionals. The same handle can be used to identify learning designs as well.
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There is a rather metaphorical property present in good patterns that can hardly be explained, but that can be felt. This property is called a Quality Without a Name, or QWAN for short – as you see, not even a name it has. It tries to explain why some designs are considered to be unique, insightful, aesthetical and really useful and others are not. Maybe the contact with the patterns communities may influence IMS-LD designers to, by pursuing the QWAN property, conceive more “live” designs, i.e. designs that are “flexible, extensible, adaptable, reusable and have other qualities of living things” (Beedle, 1997).
•
Patterns are backed by communities, not isolated institutions. Pattern design is above all a collaborative activity. Using wikis as a collaborative infrastructure, patterns are developed in an iterative work that goes through submissions, discussions and revisions. There are even workshops organized in international conferences (called PLoPs) where pattern writers get together to discuss proposals for patterns. Thus, learning designers can benefit from the work of these organized communities to create UoLs, instead of starting “from scratch”.
To wrap up this section, we should add that being a pattern a cross-cutting concept, teachers who come from different areas of knowledge, such as engineering, computing science, biology, etc, may have already had previous contacts with patterns from those areas, what will ease the way to a good understanding of pedagogical patterns and, consequently, to create better UoLs.
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5. WHAT IMS-LD CAN PROVIDE TO PEDAGOGICAL PATTERNS Just as IMS-LD can benefit from proximity with pattern community, the opposite also holds true. The possibility of executing a pattern is what first comes to mind. It is a common sense that “patterns guide humans, not machines. They will not generate code; they do not live inside CASE tools” (Coplien, 1996). But with the aid of Learning Design, we can now have them “executed”, though indirectly. We can think of a pattern as a “class” whose “objects” are in the form of Learning Designs, the difference to a programming language being that, there are no compilers to automate this process. Perhaps this is a better approach, as it tends to separate concerns: pattern writers do as they please in a literary form and learning designers would manage to express these ideas in plain XML. In objectoriented programming, we would call it “decoupling”. As Riehle and Zullighoven (1996) point out, a context cannot be completely formalized since it is infinite and therefore largely informal. But by using a formal language as IMS-LD, we are compelled to state at least the most important variables affecting the learning process, which otherwise we might just overlook. This kind of omission is rather common in informal representations like Pedagogical Patterns, which rely a great deal on the human ability to interpret ambiguous statements, filling in gaps and making assumptions based on previous knowledge and experience. In this case, we might end up creating more precise patterns instead of generic ones. Another benefit that patterns can draw from the IMS-LD is that just as patterns can be the source of learning designs, learning designs can also be at the origin of new online patterns. But this transformation process is a bit different: by trial and error, a learning design can evolve with time and give origin to derivations, versions, etc. Thus an XML file (or preferably its corresponding UML activity diagram) could be "reverse engineered" to a new pedagogical pattern, and as such, become "visible" to the non-expert.
6. FROM A PEDAGOGICAL PATTERN TO AN IMS LEARNING DESIGN In this section we will analyze a pedagogical pattern example, which will serve as the first step towards the elaboration of an IMS-LD learning scenario. In fact, we will not obtain a full-blown IMSLD scenario ready for execution at the end of this process, but something we call an IMS-LD template. By doing such a transformation, we are passing from an informal notation to a more formal one and in such cases we depend to a great extent on the precision -or lack thereof- in including as many elements as possible from the target (formal) language. Reaffirming what was said in the previous section, without being much constrained, a pattern author can explicitly state many of those constituting elements, while also omitting some – or even all - of them; of course, the more that is omitted by the pattern author, the greater the task for the learning designer who will be required to elicit the missing elements from the text presented. In this section we are going to dissect the “Peer Feedback” pattern, which belongs to the Feedback Patterns Language, authored by Bergin et al. (2002). This pattern language is composed of 22 patterns that document some successful techniques to assist teachers in providing feedback to students. To simplify the reading of this section, we use the following convention: words or expressions that map directly to IMS-LD elements are enclosed between a “less than” and a “greater than” sign, mimicking to some degree their original representation in an XML file. Note however that they may or may not be the actual elements present in the IMS-LD schemas. Also, whenever we refer to sections of a pedagogical pattern form, we use bold letters. The “Peer Feedback” pattern is reproduced in the Annex A and in order to facilitate the identification of the different parts of the pattern, we included the names of the sections between brackets (not present in the original form). When we map a Pedagogical Pattern to an IMS-LD, we have to pinpoint as much information as possible that corresponds to IMS-LD elements so as to build a valid XML file out of them. So, we are going to look for matches to (learner and staff), , , , the methodology part (, and ), etc. We certainly expect to find most relevant information in the solution part of a pattern, since that is where elements are combined and their relationships laid out, relationships that are required to solve the stated problem in the stated
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context. But if you are planning to convert pedagogical patterns into IMS-LDs, prepare yourself to carefully scan the consequences and discussion sections as well, since they are complementary to the solution. In the very beginning, following the title of the pattern, comes the context. It provides the conditions of applicability for the pattern. It is interesting to note that some references to other patterns are included here (Try it Yourself and Build and Maintain Confidence), reinforcing the idea of a pattern language. Next comes the problem statement (coupled with forces), which may well introduce some basic elements from the IMS-LD model (like , , etc) but almost always superficially. Thus, this section will be more helpful for the understanding of the pattern than for providing learning designers with useful information intended for the IMS-LD model. Right after problem is the solution section, which, in tandem with consequences, is the place where you will most likely locate the information sought after (i.e., matching IMS-LD elements). For example, in the very first sentence - which almost always begins with a “therefore”-, we can already collect important information: “Therefore, invite students to evaluate the artifacts of their peers” From this sentence alone, we can infer that: a) We have two distinct , one responsible for creating an artifact (say, the “creator”) and the other in charge of evaluating the peer’s accomplishment (the “reviewer”). b) We have an , e.g. named “evaluate artifact”. A point worth noting here is that it is still soon to say if “evaluate artifact” is in fact a single and atomic or if it is rather an , composed of smaller activities to be made explicit later on in the pattern. Another remark is that this activity is unnecessarily restrictive, unless we extrapolate the meaning of artifact here to express any output from a student liable to evaluation by a peer (a composition, a test, an oral presentation, etc). The following sentences, up to the end of the paragraph (corresponding to the rest of the solution and the beginning of the consequences sections), on the other hand, although important to grasp the real intention of the pattern, add too little in terms of elements to be used in the IMS-LD file. But then next comes: “As soon as the students have completed their artifacts they will pass the artifact on to the next student or group of students”. Although this sentence does not contribute directly in terms of foundational elements of LD, it gives us an important clue: that the students can also work in groups. This certainly will have a major impact on the IMS-LD scenario, even if you will have to “mine” for the actual elements elsewhere (or maybe to create them yourself). Moving on in the Feedback Pattern, we come to: “Every receiver now has the task of understanding the artifact and to provide constructive feedback”. This sentence suggests two new , for example, understand the artifact and provide feedback. The verb understand is too generic and demands further clarification depending on the type of artifact. As a matter of fact, we can never ask someone to understand something. All we can do is ask him/her to read, to manipulate, to analyze, etc. So, we would be better off replacing it with a more precise one in our IMS-LD model. In the fourth paragraph of the solution section we can see the textual representation of a learn flow scenario, in which , and are linked, as well as spot some clues about synchronization of . This corresponds precisely to what we describe in the part of the IMS-LD model. “If the artifacts were produced in teams consider one team member accompanying the artifact as an agent”, for example, suggests a new , titled “agent”, that had to be created if it was decided that learners should work in teams. Here we may have to take a decision that will have a major impact on the design: either we create two different designs, one for a team-based and another for a pair-based scenario, or we create a single design that accommodates both approaches, by introducing IMS-LD level B conditions and properties. In the latter case, the “agent”
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would be created and the part of the scenario depending on it - a specific for example – would only be executed “group” true, for example. The Peer Feedback Pedagogical Pattern suggests several possible learning paths, but for the sake of simplicity we opted for a simple one: students working in pairs. Also, we deliberately chose the path “assign some time so the artifact producer and the reviewer can discuss what they have learned in a dialog” (in detriment to the alternative: “give everybody a chance to report [to the whole group] on what they have learned.”) Finally we have made the following design decisions: • • •
one single ; We need a synchronization point right after the “reviewer” provides feedback, to ensure that both roles start the discussion together. So we decided to create two acts: one for the review/feedback moments and the other for the discussion time; no activity-structure was created;
After all those considerations, the final scenario can be represented by the UML activity diagram shown in figure 1. Also, in the Annex B we can find the resultant IMS-LD version of the same learning scenario, which was edited with the Reload IMS-LD Editor, version 2.0.0. In order to illustrate the process of passing from a pedagogical pattern to a IMS-LD scenario, we had to make some decisions. Of course making all those considerations/design decisions in a deliberate way is not the best approach, what takes us to some central questions in this work: “what can be considered a ‘good’ design choice?” Or “how to assure that design decisions made do really capture the intention of the pattern?” In this process of migrating from one representation full of semantic ambiguity to a more constrained one, we will eventually face issues about conformance to the source representation and the quality of the target one. Our approach to address such questions draws on the “Open Movements” (Schweik and Semenov, 2003). Presenting well-known examples like Open Source (Open Source, 2005) and Open Content (Open Content, 2005), the “open approach’s” rationale is to accept contributions from anybody and, in a process of continuous and successive improvements by the members of a given community. Thus, with time, the initial inputs tend to acquire the desired characteristics –in our case, a satisfactory level of quality and conformance. To this purpose, we are developing a prototype software that enables the creation of learning scenarios making use of the “social filtering” provided by the open approach. This subject will be tackled in a future paper.
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Figure 1. UML Activity Diagram for the Feedback Pattern scenario
7. CONCLUSION This work was motivated by the need to bring together two disparate approaches to the same problem of describing teaching strategies. In fact, Learning Design and Pedagogical Patterns offer different perspectives and representations of a pedagogical scenario: one was conceived to be read by machines, whereas the other was made to be read by teachers, instructors, pedagogues, in sum, by people; one is more declarative, whereas the other is more prescriptive; while one is deterministic, the other is non deterministic; one is more formal, the other is more informal. In practice, Learning Designs are machine interpretable solutions to problems appearing in a learning context whereas Pedagogical Patterns provide a form-based notation to capture all these elements. Also, the scope of the Pedagogical Patterns can be considered a bit wider, to the extent that they could easily be applied to help design not only methods, but also content and services used in e-learning environments. For example, patterns can be written to help content creators author more targeted learning objects (e.g., to better address an audience with some kind of disability). In the service side, the simple identification, via the IMS-LD metadata, of a given pedagogical pattern with a constructivist slant, for example, would immediately indicate the most appropriate companion tools. This could happen by discriminating a more strict assessment tool that only measures the final outcome against a more holistic one that take in account the whole learning process, including, for example, self and peer evaluations. In a not-so-distant future, when service-based learning components will be available for different purposes, this flexibility could be very useful. And future IMS-LD players will certainly take advantage of this possibility. In such cases, ideally, Pedagogical Patterns should precede the creation of both content, service and learning design, as they possibly bring invaluable clues on how to develop these resources and/or on how to delivery it.
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From the exercise we made in the last section, of passing from one pedagogical pattern to an IMS-LD model, we noted that despite the similarities from both notations, they also present some important differences that go deeper than we have first realized. First, it became quite clear that the best analogy for a pedagogical pattern is not a full-fledged IMS-LD scenario (contained in a Unity of Learning), but instead an IMS-LD template. The idea of a template is that a given pedagogical pattern can be applied to different situations and so should an IMS-LD representing the same scenario. For example, the Feedback Pattern can be used in a Chemistry, Computer Programming, or Biology courses indistinctly. Thus, it does not make sense to package in the same archive both the LD script (i.e., the imsmanifest.xml file) and the required learning objects. Likewise, when using services (e-mail, conference, etc) there should be a way of deferring references to physical resources (e-mail addresses, URLs) to runtime, when those resources will be known. As a workaround, we can avoid using any of the environment sub-elements (i.e., learning-object and service), otherwise the validation against the IMS-LD schemas will fail. With an IMS-LD template, this validation would be relaxed. The practical aspect of using IMS-LD templates is that the creation of a Unity of Learning would be a two-phased process: in the first moment, the creation of the template itself and then, possibly right before the execution time, the “instantiation” or “population” of the template, when the template will grow into a full-fledged Unity of Learning. Also, while it is quite common in a pattern to have “wide-scope” sentences like “help the student to …”, this practice is unacceptable in IMS-LD based online learning. Sure, help clearly denotes an intervention by the part of the staff role (tutor, teacher, etc), which would certainly give rise to an activity in the IMS-LD model. But the problem here is that help lacks precision and requires further clarification when it comes to translate it to an IMS-LD activity. How can this help be achieved? By participating in a chat? By intervening in the forum? By sending an e-mail to the class? By providing further resources to students? Certainly much of this “vagueness” from pedagogical patterns can be attributed to the fact that most of them are intended for class-based situations, when teachers decide on the spot how to better help students. It’s important to add that not all Pedagogical Patterns are fit for this kind of translation to an IMS-LD representation. For example, in the same pattern language from where the Peer Feedback Pattern was taken, we have also the Challenge Understanding pattern, whose “solution” section states: “Therefore, give the participants exercises, tasks or activities that challenge their understanding.” Certainly this goes a long way before it can be translated into an LD script. One of the main advantages of the IMS-LD approach is to enable the reuse of educational strategies stored in repositories. However, considering that such strategies are conceived by people, it is reasonable to think that they are first expressed in a natural language. The process of transformation into a formal representation always incurs in loss and involves necessarily two critical moments: first the designer develops a particular interpretation on the intent of the creator, and then “freezes” this interpretation into a model using the formal language. The problem is that this “interpret-and-freeze” process leaves little room to adaptation, if the modeled strategy does not fit the needs. Thus we argue that storing educational strategies also in the form of Pedagogical Patterns can add value to the repository, because if we are not satisfied with a given learning design, we can always go back to the “source” and build a new model. That is, with pedagogical patterns we can defer the “freezing” time up to the last minute, when it will then give rise to a new IMS-LD model. Before that, the learning strategy is documented in natural language, and therefore, always open to negotiation. As a final remark, we’d like to add that the drawing together of the Learning Design and Pedagogical Patterns communities can only be of benefit to each. And if the two decide to collaborate, we will end up by having the best of both worlds: the insightful and interconnected idiosyncrasy of patterns and the deterministic – and machine interpretable– approach of the learning designs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the Fundação Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), from the Brazilian Ministry of Education, which has part-funded this work.
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REFERENCES Alexander et al. (1977). A pattern language: town, buildings, construction. New York: Oxford University Press. Appleton, B. (1999). Patterns in a Nutshell. Retrieved May, 2005 from http://www.cmcrossroads.com/ bradapp/docs/patterns-nutshell.html. Beedle, M. (1997). Reengineering the Application Development Process. New York: SIGS. Bergin, J. (2001). Mining Pedagogical Patterns. Retrieved March, 2005 from http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org /meetus/ ecoop2001.html. Blinco et al. (2004). Trends and Issues in E-learning Infrastructure Development. Retrieved March 2005 from http://www.jisc.ac.uk /uploaded_documents/Altilab04-nfrastructureV2.pdf. Coplien, J. (1996). Software Patterns. New York: SIGS Books & Multimedia. Eckstein, J. et al. (2002). Teaching from Different Perspectives. Retrieved March, 2005 from http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/FromDifferentPerspectives.pdf. Griffiths, D. (2004). The First Steps in Creating a Unit of Learning. UNFOLD Project. Retrieved March, 2005 from http://www.unfoldproject.net:8085/UNFOLD/about_folder/events/online/daionline/about_folder/events/ online/daionline/discussiondoc/griffiths_17nov04.pdf. IMS (2003a). IMS Learning Design Specification, retrieved May 2005 from http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/index.cfm. IMS (2003b). IMS Learning Design Best Practice and Implementation Guide. Retrieved March 2005 from http:// www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/ldv1p0/imsld_bestv1p0.html. Koper, R., & Olivier, B. (2004). Representing the Learning Design of Units of Learning. Educational Technology & Society, 7 (3), (2004) 97-111. Open Content Licenses (2000) Retrieved May 2005 from http://jan.netcomp.monash.edu.au/opendoc/paper.html. Open Source Initiative (2005). Retrieved May 2005 from http://www.opensource.org. PPP (2001). The Pedagogical Patterns Project. Retrieved March, 2005 from http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org Riehle, D. & Züllighoven (1996) . "Understanding and Using Patterns in Software Development." Theory and Practice of Object Systems 2 1 (1996): 3-13. Schweik C.M. and Semenov A (2003). The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming: Implications for Addressing Complex Public Policy and Management Problems. First Monday 8(1). Retrieved March 2005 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_1/schweik/. Viljamaa, P. (1995). The Patterns Business: Impressions from PLoP-94. ACM Software Engineering Notes 20(1).
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APPENDIX A: PEER FEEDBACK IN THE PEDAGOGICAL PATTERN NOTATION PEER FEEDBACK ** [Context] The students have produced some artifacts and you want them to learn both how to improve their own artifact, and how to help others improve. The artifacts might be developed via TRY IT YOURSELF. Furthermore you want to Build and Maintain Confidence. [Forces and Problem (in bold)] *** Typically people assume that learning involves receiving feedback, but this is a rather reactive way of learning and ignores the fact that students can learn a lot by giving feedback. Students are knowledgeable and are able to give helpful feedback, but often they are not confident about the relevance of their experience and are unsure about the value of their own knowledge. [Solution and Consequences] *** Therefore, invite students to evaluate the artifacts of their peers. The students will provide feedback to their peers by drawing on their own experience and because each student will also have produced the artifact for himself or herself, their experience and knowledge will be explicitly relevant. Students often expect to learn from the teacher, but if you also want them to learn how to learn they have to be less dependent on the teacher. Note that peer feedback has value both for the one giving and the one receiving the feedback, but perhaps more for the giver. As soon as the students have completed their artifacts they will pass the artifact on to the next student or group of students. Every receiver now has the task of understanding the artifact and to provide constructive feedback. Carefully introduce good ways of providing feedback, to ensure that the feedback will be constructive and not destructive. See FEEDBACK SANDWICH. If the artifacts were produced in teams consider one team member accompanying the artifact as an agent. The agent can provide valuable insights for the review team. Give each team the chance to report to the whole group on what they have learned, when evaluating the artifact as well as what the agent has learned from the reviewers. If the artifacts were produced by individuals instead, ask the students to pass the artifact around. Depending on the size of the whole group, either again give everybody a chance to report on what they have learned, or assign some time so the artifact producer and the reviewer can discuss what they have learned in a dialog. You can provide special feedback forms to facilitate this. You have to make sure, that the critique is always formulated in a positive way, so that the students who produced the work learn rather than feel offended. You can support the students accepting the feedback (and perhaps admitting mistakes) by admitting yourself that Nobody is Perfect [VF]. [Discussion] *** Students will learn by providing feedback to peers: through critiquing they learn from others' mistakes and insights. This enables them to also learn from their colleagues, which in turn draws the students’ attention away from the teacher. In addition they learn how to critique in a way that will further help their peers to improve their work. When the student moves later to the world of work she will be called on to critique the work of others, so this is good early practice under your guidance. Furthermore allowing all participants to produce an artifact as well as to review an artifact reinforces self-confidence. Because even a student who has struggled producing the artifact will be able to give valuable feedback on an artifact produced by another student. This way every student learns that s/he can contribute something to the final production of an artifact.
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A variation on this pattern, PEER GRADING, suggests that it may be appropriate for students to provide part of the grade for other students. This is especially useful in team projects. The portion of the overall grade provided by peers should be small and objectively assigned. [Examples] *** For example, writers’ workshops at pattern conferences work in a similar way. While the author is present, a group of other pattern authors evaluate the work following strict evaluation rules. Because, typically, every reviewer is also an author, the whole group will also evaluate her work, with the first author now being in the role of the reviewer.
ANNEX B: THE PEER FEEDBACK NOTATION
PATTERN IN THE IMS-LD
Feedback Pedagogical Pattern Learner R-Creator R-Reviewer R-Tutor A-Create-Artifact Produce an artefact PT45M A-Review-Artifact Review the artifact PT15M A-Provide-Feedback
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Provide feedback to the creator PT15M A-Provide-Assistance Provide Assistance to students PT1H30M A-Discuss-Experiences Discuss Experiences PT15M AS-Review Play ACT-Create-Artifact RP-Create-Artifact ACT-Create-Review RP-Review
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RP-Tutor-Assist ACT-Discussion RP-Reviewer-Discuss RP-Creator-Discuss
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