From planning learning paths to assessment: Innovations to the practical benefits of Learning Design

The Interactive Technologies Group is working on several research lines (mainly in the context of the TENCompetence project) aiming at innovating and enhancing the technological support to Learning Design. In particular, GTI is working on three main topics: planning learning paths, flexibility in the enactment of learning designs and innovative forms of assessment. With the explosion of educational offers, keeping track and planning learning paths has become a real challenge. GTI’s approach to tackle this problem consists in a tool that visualizes educational units and enables the exploration of large datasets. It considers three levels of interaction (overview, planning, close up) with enables the user to converge on proper options. On the other hand, learning paths are composed of educational units which should be designed considering appropriate methodologies. GTI has selected the dialogic learning approach to study flexibility issues. This methodology entails that the learners are able to participate in the (on-going) design of the units. This situation demands a different approach to the current IMS LD implementations in which editors are not integrated in runtime systems and where the designs need to be planned in advance. To approach this problem GTI has developed an LD template (based on dialogic learning) that can be directly integrated in runtime systems. Moreover, IMS LD can be jointly used with IMS QTI to incorporate test-based assessment. GTI has extended the existing support for enacting QTI tests and is currently integrating this support into an LD system. Furthermore and with the aim of providing new forms of interaction beyond those provided by QTI, GTI has proposed to integrate Web 2.0 services with QTI items. As a first example, GTI has developed a QTI assessment engine enhanced with web maps from Google Maps, which enables the user to interact with the map to answer questions.