As part of the Technical Standards for the DER (TS-DER), Link Affiliates recently completed an investigation into the school sector’s requirements for the sharing of lesson plans.  As with other activities for the TS-DER project, a panel of experts from the school’s sector was drawn together to form a focus group to assist with the investigation.   The lesson plans activity had two broad objectives.

1. Identify requirements for the sector for the sharing of lesson plans.
2. Build a demonstrator showing how lesson plans can be shared between disparate environments.

Identifying requirements for sharing lesson plans

The focus group consisted of members with diverse backgrounds and experience.  This was reflected in the group’s definitions of what lesson plans are and the benefits obtainable from sharing them.  Lesson plans are a commonly used term and, like other forms of digital content such as e-portfolios and learning objects, mean different things to different people.

The focus group all agreed that defining lesson plans was an important step to take before looking at how or if to share them.  Within different contexts, lesson plans could look quite different.  Any interoperability specification addressing lesson plans would need to be able to accommodate this characteristic of them – ie it would need to be sufficiently flexible to address a wide range of lesson plans that have potentially quite different structures and components.

Looking at existing standards specifications, the IMS Common Cartridge K-12 group was the only mainstream standards group that appeared to be active in this space.  This group has recognised the needs of the K-12/Schools sector and is working on the Common Cartridge specification examining how a number of dynamic forms of content such as lesson plans can be accommodated.  The group recognises the increasing importance of the potential for the sharing of digital lesson plans.

Sharing is seen to be a very important concept and one that needs to be encouraged however it faces a number of challenges including, but not limited to:

• What types of content will provide benefit through sharing (ie is it worth sharing lesson plans – are the benefits as great as those derived from other types of content)?
• Willingness to share.  Sharing and openness is greater (as a generalisation) among specific demographics.
• Barriers to sharing:
  • Is my content worth sharing?
  • Practitioners afraid of how their content may be perceived.
  • I don’t want to be seen as claiming certain ideas/concepts as my own as much of what I have learned is from colleagues and I don’t want to be seen as stealing their ideas.
  • Not knowing how to share.
• Some of our software systems don’t really encourage sharing (eg default option is not to share).
• Licensing – what type of licensing is appropriate?
• How do I choose a licence?
• Third-party content/copyright infringement etc.
• Findability.  How do you make lesson plans discoverable?
• Quality.  What sort of quality control should there be on sharable lesson plans, if any.

The challenges for the sharing of lesson plans are not unique and generally apply to the sharing of any educational content.  Sharing is a major challenge and further work on it is something that we believe will benefit the sector more broadly.

Lesson plans Demonstrator

The lesson plans focus group saw two separate pilot projects investigate the sharing of lesson plans.  Both projects integrated Scootle and Moodle.  Scootle (http://www.scootle.edu.au) is a national service that provides access to a wide range of digital curriculum resources from The Le@rning Federation.  In addition to providing learning objects, Scootle provides teachers with the ability to creating ‘learning paths’.  These learning paths are sequences that can broadly be described as lesson plans.  They contain some of the components that you may expect to find in a lesson plan.

Moodle is a very well known and well-adopted open source learning management system (LMS).  More correctly, it is a course management system.  Many schools in Australia use Moodle as an LMS.

One demonstrator project was carried out by The Curriculum Corporation (now Education Services Australia) and the other was carried out by DECS SA.

Both projects investigated and implemented taking a learning path from Scootle and importing it into Moodle.

Both projects settled on developing their own ‘proprietary’ approach to the integration. These were relatively simple integrations and there was no scope for further interoperability beyond the immediate scope of the projects.

Both projects exported the learning path as ‘XML-like’ documents.  There was some discussion on whether it would be appropriate to define a ‘micro-format’ that could be used by others to create a simple approach to the interoperability of lesson plans.

Both projects were successful in demonstrating how lesson plans can be created in one environment and exported then used successfully in another environment.

The DECS SA project went a step further and has since released the functionality into production.  A number of DECS SA Moodle implementation now have the ability to import lesson plans from Scootle.

Conclusions

The focus group all agreed on the value of lesson plans however given the diverse nature of the group, had differing opinions on the value of sharing them.  One key reason for this is the varied opinions of what a lesson plan actually is, how it can be described and how it can be shared.  Perhaps the reason for this is that lesson plans have not had as much focus on them as other forms of digital learning content.  To an extent, digital lesson plans is a ‘newer’, less well-defined area.  There was broad agreement though that lesson plans are an important form of digital content and there is a lot of potential with the ability to share them across different systems and organisations.

Source: http://blog.linkaffiliates.net.au/2010/07/07/technical-standards-for-the-digital-education-revolution-lesson-plans/