CADMOS: A learning design tool for Moodle courses

http://cosy.ds.unipi.gr/cadmos/

Michail Boloudakis, Mary Katsamani, Petros Georgiakakis

Supervisor Prof. Symeon RetalisUniversity of Piraeus Department of Digital Systems

Computer Supported Learning Engineering Laboratoryhttp://cosy.ds.unipi.gr

The Presentation in Brief …

The lesson plan challenge The CADMOS tool Use case Limitations & future work

Learning Design (LD) LD is a planning and ordering of learning activities that takes place

in a unit of learning (Current research in learning design, Rob Kopper)

A “digital lesson plan”

But not simply a narrative description – rather, it can “do” something

A teacher may create a learning design for a simple activity, for a course lasting one or a few hours, for a course lasting a few weeks or even months or for a curriculum, meaning a whole year teaching programme [Britain, 2004; Goodyear, 2005]

A teacher has to specify for the LD: Learning Activities

Orchestration of these activities (order, conditions, rules)

Learning Objects related to these activities

The Lesson Plan Challenge

A lesson plan should be sharable and re-usable A common, formal and “rich” design language should

be used Teachers as designers prefer to use graphical tools that

could guide them (e.g. WebCollage, Compendium, LAMS) (Neumann and Oberhuemer, 2009)

Teachers want to enact their lesson plans easily without requiring technical skills (e.g. LAMS)

Course Design: NeuroscienceSpring 2012 Semester

http://contentbuilder.merlot.org/toolkit/html/snapshot.php?id=20982585214994

Main Idea of CADMOS Is the Separation of Concerns (SoC), an Established

Concept in Architecture & Web Engineering Objectives of SoC

Use of Divide-and-Conquer Approach for addressing complexity of a problem

Ease of handling these smaller problems in relative isolation

Ease of solving these relatively isolated simpler problems

The term separation of concerns was probably coined by Edsger W. Dijkstra in his 1974 paper "On the role of scientific thought"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns

Separation of Concerns in CADMOS

Conceptual Model

Composite Activity

Simple Activity

Learning Resource or Service

Flow Model

Flow Model with rules

Composite structure of

activities

Concern-1 Concern-2

Concern-3 Concern-4

Advantages from the SoC idea Different Concerns: different design views & layers of

design interest Edit the conceptual model without changing anything

in the flow model (e.g. change the metadata or the resources)

Create several flow views keeping the same conceptual model

Step wise design approach Allows traceability in the design process Allows to focus on a specific view Allows to reuse the design views

Challenges

Teachers noted that needed more different types of activities and resources to use in their designs

Teachers said that needed more rules to use in the flow model

Teachers said that they needed to “run” their scenarios in a real environment

Bridging the gap between

Lesson plan & Enactment

Moodle Preview & Export

CADMOS to Moodle Structural Model

CADMOS to Moodle Resources/Activities Mapping

Case Study 17 volunteers organized from the Faculty of Primary

Education of the University of Athens & the Department of Mathematics of the Technical Institute of Piraeus

15 teachers 9 primary school teachers 6 high school teachers

9 didn’t have experience in learning design

8 had at least used one learning design tool

Each case was completed in two phases:

Phase 1: presentation of the tool in the laboratory, the students made in CADMOS a prescribed learning design 3 hours

Phase 2: the students made in CADMOS a prescribed learning design that were given from us and a learning design from their own teaching practice 1 week

Finally they completed an on-line questionnaire

Phases of the Case Studies

Evaluation

The evaluation of Cadmos Tool was done by: Evaluating the learning designs that the students

submitted in phase 2, with a subject from their own teaching practice, by using a rubric with criteria

Collecting the data from the questionnaires that the students answered

Statistics from Case Study 1/2 94,11% of the participants declared that they can easily

understand the philosophy of the tool and the two models 94,12% claimed that the use of CADMOS is very simple

to use 52,94% said that they like the tool a lot 64,71% mentioned that were satisfied from the guidance

that the tool offers them 76,47% of the participants claimed that the graphical

representation of a learning design in CADMOS is more illustrative, easy to create and to understand than the usual narrative form

Statistics from Case Study 2/2 58,82% claimed that with CADMOS they could design

easily a course for Moodle 64,70% of the participants stated that they could easily

understand how to design a Moodle on-line course using CADMOS

64,71% of them said that they agreed with the way the Moodle elements had been mapped to CADMOS conceptual elements.

58,82% of the participants claimed that the way that the course was represented in Moodle was in full accordance with the two models of CADMOS design

Results from the Evaluation of the LDs 1/2

The participants were more efficient in the design of the conceptual model rather the design of the flow model

The majority of the teachers had lack of creativity in the learning scenarios

Teachers had difficulties in associating the proper learning resources to the learning activities

Teachers used active learning and collaboration in the creation of the learning activities of their scenarios

In general, from the observation of the research team and the analysis of the submitted lesson plan, participants were satisfied by the CADMOS and hugely appreciate the fact that there is a tool that can help them design and deploy a Moodle course.

Results from the Evaluation of the LDs 2/2

Open Design issues

Annotation types Types of Moodle Resources & Activities Match teachers’ semantics with Moodle semantics

Phases Moodle topics What about weekly format?

Representation of rules How to represent rules that cannot be enacted in

Moodle?

Creating enriched document based learning

scripts

Export to Word – *.docx

CADMOS: Interoperability

Word Docx

Conceptual Model

Flow Model

CADMOS

CADMOS models

IMS LD models

CADMOS models

IMS LD models

Moodle

Future Work 1/2

CADMOS taxonomy needs validation by teachers and experienced designers: To keep CADMOS’ taxonomy rather small but effective

The mappings between learning design elements and the Moodle’s elements needs further investigation

Future Work 2/2

CADMOS should be able to import Moodle courses: To track down the actual enactment and be compared

to the originally designed learning script

Cadmos Moodle Cadmos

Our vision: the CADMOS virtual LD community Switch CADMOS page to an online community

41.76% Returning Visitor Access the online version of CADMOS tool

Create, edit & preview lesson plans in a guided & graphical way deploy them in Moodle

Download & share lesson plans as CADMOS or common docx files. Embed social media mechanisms

Share, rate & comment lesson plans through Facebook & follow colleagues through Twitter

Interoperate with other teachers’ communities Moodle Lesson Plan community

Thank you!http://cosy.ds.unipi.gr/cadmos/