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From content to practice: Sharing educational practicein edu-sharing_1134 936..951

Michael Klebl, Bernd J. Krämer and Annett Zobel

Michael Klebl is an assistant professor for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) at the Institute forEducational Science and Media Research of the Fernuniversität in Hagen. Beside distance education as an obviousarea of research and teaching, his research focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer in the context ofcooperative work processes and corporate training. Bernd J. Krämer is heading the Chair of Data Processing Tech-nology of FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. His research interests include software engineering, learning tech-nology, service-oriented computing, and social software. Annett Zobel holds an M.S. degree from the BauhausUniversity of Weimar, Germany, in the field of computer science and management. She works with metaVentisGmbH, an e-learning company based in Weimar. She was project manager for the metacoon open source LMS projectand has administratively managed the CampusContent project. Address for correspondence: Jun-Prof Dr MichaelKlebl, FernUniversität in Hagen / Hagen University, Juniorprofessur für CSCL (Computer Supported CollaborativeLearning), 58084 Hagen, Germany. Email: [email protected]

AbstractFor technology-enhanced learning, the idea of learning objects transfers the technologiesof content management, methods of software engineering and principles of open accessto educational resources. This paper reports on CampusContent, a research project andcompetence centre for e-learning at FernUniversität in Hagen that designed and devel-oped an integrated portal to a repository network named edu-sharing. This portal facili-tates sharing, joint development and reuse of learning material and pedagogicalknowledge. CampusContent focused on essential challenges concerning use and utilityof learning objects and developed principles, methods and tools that support educatorsin the process of contextualising learning objects within educational settings. Our modeloffers three levels of contextualisation: configurable objects, learning scenarios and anintegrated work environment for educators.

IntroductionThe concept of learning objects aims to facilitate exchange and reuse of educational resources,pedagogical knowledge and practical teaching experience (cf. Carey & Hanley, 2008). In thispaper, we present an integrated portal to networked learning object repositories that supportseducators in sharing, joint development and reuse of learning material and pedagogical knowl-edge. This portal, called edu-sharing, adds functional value to learning object repositories bysupporting educators in the process of contextualising learning objects with educational settings.

Prior research generated considerable knowledge on technical, educational and organisationalmatters associated with the introduction of learning objects into everyday educational practice(see, eg, Lockyer, Bennett, Agostinho & Harper, 2008). Learning objects were also enablers foropen educational practices including the Open Educational Resources (Atkins, Brown &Hammond, 2007) and the Open Education Movement (Baraniuk, 2008), which strive for uni-versal (web) access to free and high quality educational resources.

There are strong indicators for an increasing use of free learning resources offered by opencontent initiatives like the MIT OpenCourseWare (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006).

British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 41 No 6 2010 936–951doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01134.x

© 2010 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2010 Becta. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, OxfordOX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

The steady growth in content and users of learning object repositories also demonstrate a positivetrend (cf. Ochoa & Duval, 2008). However, in spite of these positive signs, recent research raisesdoubts about the impact of these activities on educational practice. Apart from technical barrierslike a lack of interoperability between learning environments and content repositories, pedagogi-cal, practical and cultural factors inhibit a wider impact of learning objects on daily practices(Campbell, 2003). Further open problems include quality assurance, reliable metadata, licensing,and the integration of reusable content and scenarios into the daily practice of teaching andlearning (for an overview, see Lau & Woods, 2009).

From observing current e-learning practice, we identified three major challenges concerning theuse and utility of reusable educational resources: flexibility, context and pedagogical expertise. Aftera brief review of the research project CampusContent and our methodological approach in thenext section, we present the theoretical background for these challenges. Then, we propose amodel of three levels of contextualisation that provide an answer to these challenges: configurableobjects, learning scenarios and an integrated work environment for educators. On these three levels, thedesign principles and specific technical solutions of the edu-sharing system address the dailypractice of teaching and learning. In the concluding section, we reflect on our results and theimplications for further research and development.

Review of campus contentIn the last decade, numerous e-learning projects have developed a huge amount of digital learn-ing materials. The German Federal Minister of Education and Research, for example, investedmillions of Euros at the beginning of this century in a four-year funding program called ‘NewMedia in Education.’ This funding prompted the production of digital learning content in Germanuniversities across all academic disciplines. However, the plethora of educational content result-ing from such efforts was not managed sustainably after the funding ran out and, even worse, thecontent was rarely designed for adaption and reuse in different learning arrangements. In con-trast to books and scholarly journals that are systematically catalogued, managed and cross-referenced by libraries, digital learning content is difficult to find, let alone to adapt with ease.CampusContent, a competence centre for e-learning at FernUniversität in Hagen, began its meth-odological research and technical development at this point with the intention to enable thesystematic and effective management, retrieval, distribution and easy exchange of digital learn-ing materials and codified educational practices.

Project aims and resultsFrom March 2005 to July 2009, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German ResearchFoundation) financially supported CampusContent as a competence centre for research informa-tion (Leistungszentrum für Forschungsinformation). The project set out in 2005 to conducttransdisciplinary research in a team of computer science and pedagogy experts with the aim tosupport sharing, joint development and reuse of learning material and pedagogical knowledge,both through methodological and technical contributions.

As an academic project, CampusContent aimed at higher education and was inspired by ourexperiences with technology-enhanced distance education. In the course of the project, severaleducational institutions, ranging from schools to vocational education providers, aspired to inte-grate the methods and technology developed in CampusContent in their e-learning. In particular,local and regional school networks committed to technology-enhanced learning at different typesand ages of schooling raised a strong demand for content-sharing technology that is able toaccommodate a range of learning management systems and authoring tools. To take this wideruse of project outcomes into account, the project launched a comprehensive portal under thename ‘edu-sharing’ in August 2009, after the funding period had ended. The core of edu-sharing

Sharing educational practice in edu-sharing 937

© 2010 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2010 Becta.

consists of a network of homogeneous learning object repositories. Each edu-sharing node comeswith a local repository, is enriched by common community services, and can be embedded inlocally preferred learning environments and authoring tools for content production. Edu-sharingis a free open source software. The default distribution includes several authoring tools andlearning management systems (Moodle, metacoon, OLAT). Currently, the edu-sharing technol-ogy is undergoing pilot-tests at select universities and schools and smaller revisions to accommo-date change requests from the pilot users. Participating academic institutions and their serviceorganisations have set up their own instances of the edu-sharing portal. These distributedinstances are transparently connected with each other through web services to form a distributedsharing infrastructure serving heterogeneous learning management systems (LMSes).

To provide for dissemination, evolution and sustainability, the CampusContent team also foundeda non-profit-making association, called edu-sharing.net e.V. (edu-sharing.net, 2010). The asso-ciation, which is open to institutional and personal members, allows different stakeholders tocoordinate their demands and development efforts in one of the edu-sharing communities. Whileuser groups like educational institutions, teaching staff and content providers can negotiate anddefine their needs and priorities for further development, maintenance or customisation, softwaredevelopers are invited to provide technical solutions based on a shared cost model.

Methodological approachThe methodological approach used in the CampusContent project follows the idea of user-centreddesign (Vredenberg, Isensee & Righi, 2001). Research and development focused on the dailypractice of teaching staff. To engage future users in the development process, the multidisci-plinary project team conducted field studies, organised focus groups, and performed task analysesalong with informal expert reviews. These investigations advanced the understanding of user andtask requirements in an iterative design process. Starting from early design ideas leading to theimplementation of a prototype system, the evaluation of both technical solutions and educa-tional approaches was primarily qualitative, always questioning both asserted requirements andproposed results.

The iterative design process consisted of four phases (see Figure 1). First, the project team putemphasis on the formalisation of learning scenarios, the design of the architecture and function-ality of a first prototype of a learning object and scenario repository, and its implementation. Thisprototype was limited to core services including search and find, browse, upload, download, and(re-)combine content and scenario templates within the repository. Other objectives of the firstphase included the creation of solid conceptual and methodological foundations integratingcomputer science expertise with outcomes from educational technology and pedagogicalresearch. In particular, we aimed to carry over mature component-based software engineeringprinciples, such as cohesion, decoupling, late composition or parameterisation, to learningobjects (cf. Krämer & Han, 2009). The pedagogical challenge was to reconcile the need for

Figure 1: Project phases

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context-independence, which is a prerequisite for better reuse and adaptability, and the need forcontextuality and customisation, which effective learning settings require (cf. Baumgartner &Kalz, 2005).

The first prototype was evaluated and tested with future users in the second phase. Here, weconducted a series of interviews with focus groups and informal reviews with both individualusers and experts. Based on the findings of this inspection and a re-evaluation of possible basecomponents, a comprehensive portal architecture was designed. This portal provides an inte-grated work environment for educators including authoring tools and learning managementsystems that operate on top of a learning object repository.

In the third phase, core components were implemented and integrated into the target platform.The industry-proven open source content management system Alfresco forms the technical basisfor the repository. The open source portal software Liferay provides functionalities for socialnetworking and joint development of courseware. Meanwhile, a parallel subgroup designed andimplemented new methods and tools for effective content creation based on predefined templates,and collected and evolved sample content to best practice examples (cf. Krämer & Han, 2009;Krämer, Klebl & Zobel, 2010). A further subgroup codified widely accepted learning scenarios inthe form of content-free didactic scenario templates and made them available in the portal.

The fourth project phase began with the deployment of the software in four different installationsand their use in pilot applications with user groups from universities, schools and continuingeducation institutions. The rollout of the revised technology took place early February 2010 atthe occasion of the LEARNTEC conference and fair in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The multidisciplinary research team of CampusContent pursued both research and developmentequally, with the intention to enable sharing, joint development and reuse of learning materialand pedagogical knowledge. When the focus was on technology development, our methodologywas driven by formative research (cf. Reigeluth & Frick, 1999). When the focus was on researchin the field of technology-enhanced learning, the approach of design-based research suggested toanalyse, to generalise and to document findings from the design process in order to generatepractical knowledge to be shared with a broader scientific and design community (cf. Wang &Hannafin, 2005). To clarify this concept, we provide an overview of the theoretical backgroundof our work in the next section before we give an account on the principles that guided thedevelopment of edu-sharing in the subsequent section.

Theoretical backgroundThe concept of learning objects arose towards the end of the last century. It addressed the need foran economic way to high quality digital learning materials by means of sharing and reusingresources. The basic idea was to dissect existing courses into relatively small building blocks thatcan be used as autonomous units of learning or can be combined to larger learning resources.Such building blocks could be traditional media assets like figures, diagrams, photographs, text-book chapters, and exercises, or interactive and time-dependent media like simulations, anima-tions, videos or audio clips.

From the beginning, CampusContent focused on three essential challenges concerning the useand utility of learning objects: flexibility, context and pedagogical expertise. In the following, we willdescribe them in relation to a dimensional model proposed by Boyle (2008):

• Flexibility: The idea of creating educational content from smaller building blocks was inspiredby design principles of object-oriented programming, like encapsulation, cohesion and poly-morphism (cf. Boyle, 2003; Wiley, 2001) and promised to lead to a more systematic approachin instructional design. Other authors favoured the term ‘bricolage’ to describe the activity of



educators in the design and implementation of teaching (cf. Caron, Derycke & Le Pallec, 2005)and, a step further, the activity of learners in open learning environments (cf. Brown, 2008).The first perspective considers learning objects as pedagogically rich, while the second perspec-tive focuses on educational usage of resources regardless of their original pedagogical inten-tion. In his dimensional model, Boyle (2008) differentiates raw learning objects from packagedentities that conform to some interoperability standard and he considers raw learning objects aspedagogically rich. If one considers learning objects predominantly in their packaged form,however, any resource can be used as a learning object, only by packaging it into a course andlabelling it with educational metadata. From this, it becomes apparent that the utility of learn-ing objects depends on their use in the design and development process of creating both,learning materials and learning experiences. Particularly concerning the learning experiencerather than the media object itself, learning objects in their raw form have to be pedagogicallyrich and, at the same time, should facilitate their use in different educational settings. Thissupposed contradiction raises a first question: How can learning objects be designed to allow for highflexibility, bridging the requirements of systematic design with the need for adaptation and bricolage?

• Context: Even if there are plenty of learning objects available in repositories or accessiblethrough a web search, facilitating access to proper educational resources is still a major tech-nical challenge. This is because the selection of appropriate educational content for a specificlearning context depends on a variety of parameters, which are semantically rich and are notadequately met by typical metadata (if there are any at all). Hence, to find appropriate content,employing context information of intended or previous use instead of typical metadata appearsto be more promising (cf. Cardinaels, Meire & Duval, 2005). We can differentiate three sourcesfor gathering context information: First, the use of educational resources in particular learningscenarios provides information for further use. Second, the formalised description of a learningexperience, rather than the provision of learning material alone, allows for the transfer ofpedagogical expertise. Third, social software facilitates communities of educators to assess andrecommend educational resources. Several authors, including Baumgartner (cf. Baumgartner& Kalz, 2005), have described a fundamental contradiction inherent in the relation of a learn-ing object to its context. While the potential for reuse of a resource increases with its degree ofindependence from any application context, effective learning requires learning content tai-lored to the specific situation of a given educational setting. Boyle (2008) raises the question fora systematic approach towards the connection of different design levels between learningmaterials and learning experiences. In this dispute, CampusContent took a heuristic approachto answer the question: How can we extract learning objects from context to make them suitable forreuse in other educational situations?

• Pedagogical expertise: Beyond the fact that sharing and reuse can save expenses for the designand production of digital learning resources, this approach offers potential for the transfer ofeducational expertise. When educators retrieve high quality resources for learning and usethem in newly created learning experiences, they employ pedagogical knowledge that is mod-elled implicitly or explicitly. Here, a common principle of design-oriented disciplines like engi-neering or instructional design applies: There are similar solutions for different tasks. Foundingdesign work on the base of design expertise entails the transfer of a good solution that has oncebeen found for one problem or topic to another problem or topic. Hence, an essential element of(good) design is the awareness of similarities between problems in relation to context andsolution, and therefore, the reuse of approved solutions. Considering this, the reuse of learningobjects suggests transferring a media asset from context A to context B. The reuse of learningresources offers the possibility to reuse the educational logic (and wisdom, possibly) behind thevery specific learning resource. For learning, reuse often refers to proven learning methods or



common interaction sequences. In architecture, this idea of reuse was brought forward withthe conceptualisation of design patterns (cf. Alexander, Ishikawa & Silverstein, 1977). Thisapproach has been transferred to software engineering (cf. Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Vlissides,1995) and has also inspired educational thinking. On this basis, Boyle (2006) presented his‘generative learning objects’. They capture and represent design patterns for learning objectsand make them accessible for the use and adaption of learning objects. With a third dimensionspanning from object to pattern, Boyle (2008) asserts the necessity to consider pedagogicalexpertise contained in learning resources. CampusContent also started its research on thischallenge summarised in the question: How can learning objects be used to share educationalexpertise and thus provide benefit for educators and learners?

These three challenges, flexibility, context and pedagogical expertise, create barriers to the use andutility of learning objects beyond technical constraints like insufficient interoperability. All threeaffect the work processes of educators when they design and develop both learning materials andlearning scenarios. In the following section, we will present principles and tools that address theneed for flexibility, context and pedagogical expertise and support educators in the process of con-textualising learning objects with educational settings.

However, we first need to introduce specific terminology of CampusContent concerning therelationship of learning resources and educational situation. By an information object, we meanknowledge about facts, concepts, technical terms, processes and the like that is represented bydigital media assets including text, illustrations, simulation, video and audio clips, photos, maps,quizzes, or reference works. Pedagogical context consists of learning objectives and learningscenarios. The latter are patterns of learning and tutoring activities composed of pedagogicalinteractions. Together, they form a learning object in which the learning objective provides the gluebetween the information object(s) and the learning scenario. The connection between thesecomponents of a learning object is maintained sustainably as a relational structure in the reposi-tory network. Such relations can be retrieved and may inspire new combinations.

Levels of contextualisation: principles and supportIn the following subsections, we are going to describe the principles and tools we developed tosupport educators in the process of contextualising learning objects at three levels. These levelsrange from configurable objects over learning scenarios to an integrated work environment for educators.

From building blocks to configurable objectsBoyle (2003) transferred two design principles from software engineering to instructional designto cope with reusable learning objects: cohesion and decoupling. Wary of the pitfalls of creatingcohesive and relatively decoupled information objects that are pedagogically poor, he addedpedagogical richness as a third design principle. Hence, Boyle’s approach to build a learning objectstarts with the definition of a learning objective—only one per learning object at a granular levelfor each. To conform to the notion of cohesion, all information objects, quizzes and other learningtasks included in a learning object need to focus on that single learning objective. Finally, decou-pling requires the elimination or reduction of references to materials outside a learning object. Asa result, learning objects are encapsulated building blocks that can be aggregated towards alearning experience.

In addition to the approach set forth by Boyle, we introduced another design principle fromsoftware engineering: late composition. For learning objects, the idea of late composition suggestskeeping information objects and pedagogical context separate at design time and connecting bothfacets of learning objects only at reuse time. This approach combines the benefit of context-independent content and the possibility to tailor content objects to the needs of learning scenariosand individual learners. The late composition of information objects with pedagogical context



facilitates adaptation at reuse time. We investigated three different ways of adaptation: param-eterisation, customisation and application programming interfaces (cf. Krämer & Han, 2009):

• Pedagogical parameterisation refers to the modification of an information object to a specificpedagogical context by means of predefined settings. For example, a parameterisation accord-ing to the taxonomy for cognitive tasks of Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) allows for the reuseof an information object in different educational settings. When studying finite automata (alsoknown as state machines), students have to learn that an automaton modelled as a statetransition diagram can test and read given sequences of input and thereby change its state.Such an automaton is viewed as an information object that can be used for different learningtasks addressing different cognitive levels. For instance, on the level of understanding finiteautomata, a learner will be asked to determine whether the state machine will accept a giveninput sequence. On the level of analysis, a learner will be given the task to suggest expansionsto the given state transition diagram such that it models, eg. the function of an automatic tellermachine.

• Customisation implements the principle ‘design for change’ in that it allows for the adaptation ofthe content and behaviour of an information object within the limits of predefined configura-tion parameters. For selected animated and interactive learning objects, we made the learningcontent editable on the basis of Adobe’s Flex Framework. As a result, an animation templatepredefines animation and interaction patterns, and teaching staff can easily create a customisedanimation by setting parameter values and by inserting their own text, images, video or audio.A simple example is an animation originally designed for testing computer science students’comprehension of object-oriented concepts. Once the animation is started, a list of terms takenfrom a case study will roll down on the screen. Learners are required to categorise the displayeditems by moving them with the mouse pointer to the proper category folder. Obviously, one canuse this type of concept classification exercise in different disciplines. To provide a customisableversion of this learning object, we developed a corresponding animation template. Teachingstaff can now set the number and naming of concept categories, the concepts to be classified andtheir association with the proper concept category, the number of errors allowed, the maximumamount of test time, explanatory text, instruction and other parameters.

• Application Programming Interfaces (API) for information objects can be used for enhancedcustomisation where setting parameter values and inserting text or images do not suffice. Thisspecially applies, when re-users require changing the pedagogical design. This necessitateschanges not only in the appearance but also in the application logic of objects. In order to alterthe interactions between the animation and the learner, re-users need to script the interaction.Here, we created information objects (like flash animations) that can be used as softwarecomponents of another application. During development time, generic animation movementsand interaction steps are defined, which are exposed through a set of application programminginterfaces. Re-users can use these APIs to control the animation and the interaction sequencesof the information object to accommodate different learning scenarios. For example, we startedfrom a map depicting major cities and long distance routes in Germany. Through the APIs, theconnections between two cities can be highlighted. Hence, the API allows for scripting a con-troller to demonstrate the behaviour of Dijkstra’s algorithm that finds the shortest path betweentwo selected cities. In addition, enhanced scripts might let the learner control the manualexecution of the algorithm.

All three different ways of adaptation support the late composition of information objects andpedagogical context. While educators search and adapt information objects for the use as learn-ing objects in specific courses or even for single learners, they are facilitated to easily createadequate digital learning material by setting parameters, by inserting text and images or byscripting animations and interactions. The Adobe Flex Framework enables the simple compila-



tion of ready-to-use Flash-enabled learning objects. However, the demands on the skills of theteaching staff increase from parameterisation to using APIs. Some people might object thatscripting information objects to create specific learning objects is beyond the capabilities of edu-cators from non-technical disciplines. Nevertheless, there always will be a trade-off between theefforts for a graphical user interface, which allows for the creation of animation and interactionsequences, and the efforts for acquiring basic skills in a script language. In addition, differentpersons in the instructional design process will bring in different skills, particularly in an opencollaborative platform.

From content to processAt a higher level of granularity, course authors can aggregate learning objects and services forcommunication and collaboration to learning paths, which describe recommended sequences oflearning steps. Learning management systems usually offer the functionality to design courses bypresenting an outline of a learning scenario to both learners and teaching staff. However, thefeatures for sharing and reuse of learning scenarios, based on a formal description, are stilllimited—often even within a given instance of a learning management system, but indeedbetween different learning management systems. With edu-sharing, we address this need.

An early attempt to promote the idea of formalising learning processes in terms of activities, rolesof players, content, method, and metadata dates back to the Educational Modelling Language(EML, Koper & Manderveld, 2004). Core ideas of EML formed the specification IMS LearningDesign (IMS-LD) (cf. Olivier & Tattersall, 2005). As a standard, this specification aims to enablethe exchange of units of learning between different learning management systems. In IMS-LD, acourse designer expresses the flow of activities to be carried out by learners and teaching staff inan educational process through units of learning. Besides activities and roles, a unit of learningincludes references to learning objects, environments, tools, and services to be used in a runningprocess.

In CampusContent, we studied the IMS-LD specification and cognate approaches like LAMS (cf.Dalziel, 2003), intensively. However, feedback from users of our first prototype confirmed us in thedecision to provide a more pragmatic approach to codify learning processes, while adhering to thecore ideas of IMS-LD. Our approach also conforms to the working style of educators using Moodlefor the specification of learning paths (cf. Berggren et al., 2005). As a result, a simple learningscenario editor for editing and running learning scenarios is integrated in the edu-sharing portal.Since the integrated instances of Moodle and metacoon use this engine, learning scenariosdeveloped in one LMS can be run or adapted in the other. Open and flexible interfaces allow otherLMSes to use this engine, too.

The edu-sharing scenario editor organises structural, informational, social and pedagogicalaspects of a learning phase in different tabs, as illustrated in Figure 2. To reduce the complexity ofthe information model of IMS-LD, we took a pragmatic approach and selected a few key featuresas the essentials of a formal description for a teaching-learning process: learning phases, studentactivities, teacher hints, learning objectives, and general information, which are explained inmore detail:

• Learning scenarios are organised in learning phases. Learning phases represent the concept ‘act’in IMS-LD. There, multiple acts are put in sequence to form a ‘play’, which is a synonym for acertain teaching–learning method. The learning scenario editor of edu-sharing also admits thenesting of learning phases. This allows for a flexible aggregation of learning paths of differentgranularity.

• The learning scenario editor just distinguishes between two roles: teacher and learner, whileIMS-LD allows the definition of arbitrarily many roles. The Teacher Hints Tab in each phase (seeFigure 2) summarises Hints for teachers or tutors. Recommended learning activities are pre-



sented in the Student Activities Tab. The Description Tab contains general information such as theeducational intention behind the scenario, the expected educational value or general hints.

Starting from these essentials, edu-sharing supports educators to take first steps to codify theirpedagogical intentions. They facilitate the adaptation of learning scenarios for different educa-tional settings. For example, a lecturer in social sciences may find a course on Social NetworkAnalysis. As the course was designed for computer science students, she wants to adapt it to herstudent community (assumed that the licence associated with the course admits changes). Shemay want to change some experiments and exercises that require computing skills and, in par-ticular, replace a proposed case study. Such changes can be easily performed in the learningscenario editor. During the design phase, she can change roles to preview the student’s or teach-er’s view of a learning design.

We expand this support even further by the deployment of didactic scenario templates. They arelearning scenarios of different granularity defined in an abstract form without reference tospecific resources and tools to make them applicable to many subject disciplines. Fine-grainedexamples of such scenarios include devil’s advocate, active structuring, flashlight, brainstorming,concept mapping, think-pair-square and web-quest. More complex scenarios, which often rely ontool support, include case study, jigsaw classroom, puzzle method, strategic problem solving, or

Figure 2: Learning scenario editor of edu-sharing



project-based learning. For predefined templates (see Figure 2), we start from proven teaching-learning methods described in educational literature. Some of them are evaluated extensively, likecase study (cf. Chen, Shang & Harris, 2006) or project-based learning (cf. Thomas, 2000). Forothers, quality assurance relies rather on common sense and best practice sharing among edu-cators. The edu-sharing portal supports educators to design, share and adapt didactic scenarios.Since edu-sharing fosters domain specific communities of practice, collaborative processes of peerreview and rating allow for quality assurance backed by practical experience and communityengagement. To facilitate search and finding, appropriate metadata supplement these templates.They refer to group size, learning time, or type of educational event (eg, self-study, lecture,experiment, or self-assessment).

With didactic scenario templates, we transfer the design principle of late composition to the designlevel of learning paths. Context-independent didactic scenario templates offer the possibility toadd content objects, specific learning instructions and services for communication and collabo-ration (newsgroup, forum, wiki, etc.), according to the needs of a given educational setting andspecific topics of teaching. This approach is very common to many educators since didacticscenario templates resemble the notion of learning methods. In case studies, we tested the appli-cation of didactic scenario templates to instructional design tasks from real world use. In onecase, the accredited study programme called for a case study on topics of Corporate E-Learning.Employing the scenario template for the case study method, learning steps, tasks and desiredoutcomes of the students’ work in small groups were designed with minimal effort. In anothercase, we redesigned a course on Social Network Analysis. Here, a syllabus consisting of a coursetext with figures, tables, other information objects and exercises was enriched towards a learningarrangement through which the students were asked to actively participate and work collabora-tively in a transatlantic distant learning setting. As a result, some sections of the course remainedin a self-study mode, others were designed as web lecture, case study and project-based learning(cf. Krämer et al., 2010). However, for both school teachers and academic lecturers, the creationof scenario templates remains a difficult and complex task since these educational practitionerstend to think in fully contextualised scenarios. These fully contextualised scenarios are informedby learning methods, but the elicitation and formalisation of the underlying learning methoddemands support. In current research projects, we investigate systematic procedures and prin-ciples for the development of didactic scenario templates, which are apt for reuse, from givenlearning scenarios.

From workspace to workshopThe process of teaching and learning as described in learning scenarios and didactic scenariotemplates is one major application context for learning objects. However, collaborative workprocesses in instructional design are not of lesser importance, as we can see from recent devel-opments in the field of social software. With ‘social software’, we refer to applications that supportcomputer-mediated interaction and networked collaboration of people with shared interests,goals and expertise. Like with wiki systems, corresponding applications enable users to workjointly on content, as common features of groupware solutions do. However, beyond these task-related features, social software systems utilise information gathered from social interaction andrelationships to enhance the effectiveness of the users’ work. Collaborative filtering as a technol-ogy to foster information retrieval is a most prominent application of a simple principle: based onthe similarity of decisions on information objects between different users, an algorithm willcalculate the similarity of users’ preferences and then provide recommendations for the selectionof information objects (cf. Walker, Recker, Lawless & Wiley, 2004).

This principle of social navigation equals common practice in teaching. For finding learningresources as well as for dealing with instructional design questions, the most promising and most



usual way may be to ask colleagues concerned with the same subject matter—or at least to watchand examine their work. In edu-sharing, we applied the model of social navigation to learningobjects, thus expanding the learning object repository to a workspace for personal use and forcommunity use. We expect users of the edu-sharing portal to group according to disciplines, jointprojects or specific interests. Therefore, edu-sharing addresses domain specific communities oflearning. Here, we start from the concept of ‘communities of practice’ as set forth by Lave andWenger (cf. Lave and Wenger, 1991), rather than from the notion of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’that is common to considerations on Web 2.0 (cf. Surowiecki, 2005). Social networking func-tionalities and collaboration software will allow portal users to organise communities of practiceautonomously, furnish them with collective knowledge spaces and use functions for expressingrecommendations, annotations and evaluations. These communities foster commitment, repu-tation building and mutual trust. They provide also an essential source for context information tolearning objects.

However, one critical factor for the success of communities of practice is the motivation ofpractitioners, firstly, to actually participate and, secondly, to share knowledge and resources.Several design principles for initiating, fostering, developing and managing communities of prac-tice are available from literature, like design for flexibility, regard for leadership or, especially forcommunities of teaching, aptness for loosely structured social networks (cf. Reimann, 2008). Foredu-sharing, we followed an approach that puts emphasis on early benefits from the use of theportal technology. This strategy accentuates common and valuable improvements for each andsingle educator who starts working with the edu-sharing components. The user-centred devel-opment process has led to the following features in the edu-sharing system:

• The edu-sharing repository provides a personal workspace for each registered user and sustain-ably maintains open or commercial content that has been uploaded from the user’s hard disk orhas been created through an authoring activity from within the portal. In this personal work-space, educators may simply work on their own and thus can upload, create, edit and storelearning resources and learning scenarios in the repository prior to release and publication.Contrary to gathering learning resources on a local storage device, users can manage own,licensed and found open content in collections, which can be arranged in form of visual topicmaps (see Figure 3). From such collections, teaching staff can easily embed learning resourcesas well as learning scenarios in courses that are created in an attached learning managementsystem. This way, the workspace functionality augments habitual work procedures of educa-tors like: collecting content for learning, enhancing learning material, and creating learningarrangements.

• The architecture of edu-sharing assembles an integrated work environment for educators. In addi-tion to the web portal with workspace and community features, educators can access thenetworked repository seamlessly via the course management system in use. For Moodle andmetacoon, a reference implementation is already available; for OLAT, it is underway. Developersof other platforms are invited to use the open interfaces of the edu-sharing network andintegrate their LMS. The integration of shareable workspaces and content repositories in thedaily practice of educators is supplemented by the integration of authoring systems, like aQTI-compatible offline editor or an OpenOffice-based editor for SCORM-compatible content.Other authoring systems can be integrated as well. A built-in information and help system,which covers both technical issues and pedagogical fundamentals, completes the tight integra-tion of editing and executing features.

• In addition to the functionality of storage and retrieval known from common learning objectrepositories, the edu-sharing network becomes an attractive work bench for the joint creation ofcourse material and course outlines, since its web portal facilitates personalised access and col-laboration in communities of practice among scholars and teachers. Shared workspaces and



the facility to invite others to access (part of) one’s workspace support trusted communities ofpractice. In shared workspaces, users can arrange collections according to the organisationalstructure of an educational institution, according to curriculum structures, or according to adiscipline-specific taxonomy.

• A licence management component supports content owners upon upload to associate an appro-priate use licence with their works in the repository network. The edu-sharing repositorysupports open content licences such as Creative Commons. However, user surveys revealed thatthere is the need for other forms of licensing as well, especially for restricted access to propri-etary content. Educators can provide access for learners to objects in the repository from acourse management system based on an institutional licence as well, without transmittingpersonal data of learners to the repository.

The personal workspaces and the tight integration with course management systems, togetherwith authoring tools and an information system, provide an early benefit for users of the portaltechnology from the start—independent of peers’ usage of the edu-sharing portal. Educatorsmay use the repository for editing and managing their own learning resources, since there is noobligation to share drafts or protected works with the community. However, once resources areuploaded into or created within the edu-sharing system, sharing resources with other users orgroups is effortless. Particularly for the bootstrapping process of communities of practice, thisstrategy is promising. If single educators experience valuable improvements for their work, theyare likely to invite their colleagues for collaboration.

However, the login to the edu-sharing portal appears to be only a temporary solution. As moreand more educational institutions, like universities or school networks, are going to set up theirown web portal systems with collaborative tools and social software functionalities, the commonaccess to the edu-sharing workspace will be attained via an organisational login.

From utlisation data and connections between users, it is possible to derive information aboutsocial relationships and about learning resources, eg, their reuse frequency or popularity, reuse

Figure 3: Personal workspace in the edu-sharing portal



contexts and significant co-occurrences with other resources. In an earlier analysis, we exploredlog data from the LON-CAPA network and revealed latent social network structures among theusers of this cross-institutional learning content management and assessment system (Han,Kortemeyer, Krämer & Prümmer, 2008). The investigation of the relation between the activity ofscholars and the use frequency of learning objects showed that a relatively small portion oflearning resources are reused frequently and that such popular resources are contributed by asmall number of authors only. In addition, popular authors frequently used the resources con-tributed by other popular authors. In other words, popular authors form tightly connected com-munities of practice. The analysis also revealed that keywords supplied with the resources that arefrequently used together do not necessarily match. Consequently, instead of recommendingrelated content to a specific resource based on keywords, it appears to be more promising to relyon latent social structures. Hence, it is important to connect new users to communities that bestmatch the user’s interest. Here, the edu-sharing system offers interfaces for future developmentsof services based on the analysis of explicitly organised or latent social structures and othercontext information.

Results and discussionThe research project CampusContent set out to design and construct the edu-sharing portal andrepository system, which supports educators in sharing, joint development and reuse of learningmaterial and pedagogical knowledge. The pedagogical and technical approach of edu-sharingaddresses the need for an integrated solution that facilitates the practical application of learningobjects. In research and development, CampusContent followed a user-centred approach, focus-ing on the daily practice of teaching and learning. We used a formative research approach inorder to engage future users in the development process. An iterative design process establishedthe principles and tools that we presented in this paper.

Based on theoretical foundations and the findings from the formative research, we particularlydescribed three levels of contextualisation of learning objects with educational settings, rangingfrom configurable objects to learning scenarios and finally to an integrated work environment foreducators. These three levels address the essential challenges concerning usage and utility oflearning objects, ie, flexibility, context and pedagogical expertise. We consider these three challengesas closely connected to work processes of educators in the design and development of bothlearning materials and learning scenarios. For the three levels of contextualisation, we presentedprinciples and tools that support educators in the process of reuse and adaptation of both edu-cational resources and pedagogical knowledge.

• As for fine-grained media assets to be used for learning, educators may find and use config-urable objects in the edu-sharing repository network to create content objects tailored to theneeds of learning scenarios and individual learners. Here, we have considered three differentways of adaptation that allow for a late composition of information objects and pedagogicalcontext: parameterisation, customisation and application programming interfaces (APIs).

• As for a higher level of granularity, educators may find and share codified learning scenariosand didactic scenario templates in the edu-sharing portal. Both learning scenarios and didacticscenario templates convey pedagogical expertise since they result in a structured yet flexible andcomprehensible codification of pedagogical intentions. They inform educators and learnersabout the use of educational resources in learning scenarios. Hence, they provide informationon former use and thus foster further use. This allows for contextualisation.

• As for design processes that frame teaching and learning, educators may use the edu-sharingportal for individual and joint creation of course material and course outlines. Shared work-spaces and the seamless integration in course management systems as well as in institutionalweb portals provide another important context for educational resources: domain-specific



communities of educators who provide, use, assess, and recommend educational resourcesfrom this context.

These principles and tools provide added value to learning object repositories. Moreover, each ofthem is an inducement for educators to use the edu-sharing portal. While one lecturer asks forconfigurable educational media assets that enhance the learning experience, another lecturerstarts from didactical scenarios templates to reuse learning instructions for the process of teach-ing and learning. Some educators may benefit from creating and managing learning resourcesand learning scenarios on their own, while others prefer to work collaboratively in trusted com-munities of practice.

Future research will show if these affordances are sufficient to motivate educators not only to usethe edu-sharing portal, but also to share resources and knowledge with their peers, or if there isthe need for other strategies to reduce the barriers for the sustained use of shared resources andworkspaces. First experiences during the rollout of the revised technology have shown thatpotential users value the integrated functionalities at all three levels of contextualisation.

However, a shift in emphasis for requirements has become apparent. Hitherto, CampusContenthas focused on contextualisation that resulted in methods and tools of the edu-sharing system. Inpilot use cases, teachers and scholars asked for assistance in de-contextualisation, starting bothfrom given learning material and learning scenarios. Here, we will continue our work on thesystematic approach to the design of reusable learning resources and learning scenarios. Thebuilt-in information and help system of edu-sharing, which covers pedagogical matters besidestechnical issues, will be used for providing guidance. This information and help system is cur-rently created in implementation projects together with key users, resulting in immediate feed-back for the suggested methods and principles. Currently, we are also implementing furthersupport functions for communities of practice and we prepare comparative case studies with twogroups of distant students using traditional textbook-like study material and formalised onlinelearning processes with pedagogically rich learning objects, respectively.

For a comprehensive community-targeted learning infrastructure like edu-sharing, there are noquick answers about market diffusion. After the launch of the open source software in February2010, we counted 176 software downloads. However, this figure does not tell us much about theacceptance of edu-sharing. Only after an institution implemented its own instance, stocked upcontent and scenarios, established user and author groups, and talks about this publicly, can wecount it a success. Similarly, if an institution wants to join the association edu-sharing.net andrequests to establish its instance of edu-sharing as a trusted node in the repository network, wehave evidence about serious cooperation intentions. This is also true if a community requests tobe hosted on one of the nodes and accepts edu-sharing.net’s general terms and conditions.Currently, we count four networked installations at edu-sharing office at Bauhaus UniversitätWeimar, FernUniversität, Universität Leipzig, and the Communal Computing Centre LowerRhine, which serves schools in this district. In addition, we know of two unconnected edu-sharing installations in Schmalkalden and Stuttgart and two new membership applications fromregional computing centres in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) just came in.

The main difficulty in acquiring users lies in the fact that our main target group are not individu-als but educational institutions that recognise the benefits of cross-institutional sharing of edu-cational experience and cooperative development of scholarly content. Another target groups aregovernmental bodies maintaining educational servers for school districts. Attracting such part-ners, negotiating individual (adaptation) needs, formulating corresponding legal contracts, andwaiting for final decisions just requires a lot of endurance and time. Just recently, the associationof communal computing centres in NRW decided to use edu-sharing as the central repository andsharing infrastructure of learn line NRW, the education portal for schools in the state North



Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, which is managed by the State Ministry of Schools and ContinuingEducation. We have also good chances that edu-sharing be adopted as part of the e-learninginfrastructure for the universities in Thuringia, Germany, and we are optimistic that ongoingnegotiations with several other German universities will end positively.

AcknowledgementsThe Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation) sponsored thiswork under code number 44200719. The authors would also like to thank all collaborators andstudents who were involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of edu-sharing.

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