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Integrating functional skills with learning

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Skip to main content. Home Education, training and skills Further and higher education, skills and vocational training. Research and analysis Integrating functional skills with learning. Published 2 March DV8 Training Ltd - Good practice example. When they are web editors e.

In the case of desktop tools e. Both for conceptualization and authoring tasks, ILDE does not impose the usage of one particular tool. Rather, its Restful API allows the integration of new authoring tools also being integrated as of this writing , thus enlarging the set of available choices for practitioners. The enabled integration, through the use of the API and having a data layer separated from the services, avoid the need of double sign-on. It is worth noting that some of the conceptualization templates, the use of Google Drive applications, and the OpenGLM authoring tools were integrated after considering the feedback from the preliminary pilots phase C in Figure 1 , section 2.

As a result of this integrative approach, ILDE manages arbitrary file types formats for the learning designs, some of which can be used further for implementation—e. Middlewares Alario-Hoyos et al. It also manages, by interacting with the GLUE! Interestingly, along the iterative refinements of ILDE, additional Moodle versions were supported, so as to cover the emerging needs of the user groups; this was achieved through the development of a new GLUE!

Such configuration steps depend on the technical characteristics and specific configuration of the VLE of interest. Thus, for instance, using the implementation features of ILDE with a Moodle server may require the installation of a plug-in available in the ILDE software distribution. Finally, when the tooling available for integration did not cover aspects of the use cases e. The portal and all components in the services layer represent the core of ILDE, which is located in three dedicated servers databases, implementation services, and portal with the remainder of the services for performance reasons.

Depending on the case, integrated tools can run in external machines maintained by tool providers and the VLEs are typically hosted in the educational centers. Physical architecture of various ILDE installations available at http: The implemented architecture offers practitioners access to multiple conceptualization and authoring functions in the context of a single environment. Integrated conceptualization templates and tools have different aims use cases UC1, UC2. Some of them e. The Persona Card Mor et al. Other conceptualization templates and tools integrated allow practitioners to sketch preliminary ideas for their learning designs [e.

Besides, users can upload pictures of learning designs created in a board or in paper and edit open free-form conceptualizations. Authoring is the process of producing full-fledged definitions of learning designs so that they are ready to be applied with particular groups of learners i. If the authored learning designs are represented computationally, the technical setup of the VLE where the learning design is to be implemented can be done automatically see implementation functions in section Broad Interest in Use Cases.

Different authoring tools may use different learning design representations, pedagogical and authoring approaches or may require different levels of expertise. As explained above, Web Collage is specifically devoted to the design of collaborative learning activity flows, using visual representations of pedagogical patterns in a way that guides authoring and hides the technical complexities associated to the computational representations of the created learning designs.

OpenGLM uses a visual representation based on diagrams of interconnected activities that lends itself to authoring with diverse pedagogies. Deployment involves configuring and setting up of learning platform resources according to what is expressed in a learning design e. Practitioners can add and configure their credentials for access to the VLEs where they would like to implement their learning designs Figure 6A. To implement a learning design, a practitioner needs to first select the learning design Figure 6B and then indicate in which of the VLEs configured she would like to do the implementation.

The next step is to bind the students and tools to the corresponding elements specified in the learning designs assign students to activities and groups, and indicate which tools will be use to support each activity.

Different cooks will then make different instantiations of the recipe depending on their setting, tools available, etc. Additional observed requirements included the need for licensing learning designs and features for awareness of other community members' activity. In this paper we investigate whether it is possible to provide a flexible community system that supports multiple learning design tasks. There are some useful weblinks at the end of this page. The data about the users' perceptions were collected through questionnaires after the workshops and interviews after the enactment: The underlying assumption is that a participatory learning design culture can change the way teachers work, transforming them from lonely practitioners into networked professionals, engaged in pedagogical inquiry Persico and Pozzi,

This can be done using GLUE! Once the implementation phase is over, practitioners can optionally use the VLE's own authoring capabilities to fine-tuned the learning design automatically deployed by ILDE. Practitioners can share their learning designs created with any of the conceptualization and authoring functions in ILDE with other members of the community Figure 7. Sharing can be done with either view or edit rights, so that other practitioners can be aware of the learning designs created in the community UC6 , eventually reuse them UC7 or participate in the co-edition of the learning designs UC8.

By default, learning designs are shared with all of the members in a community with view rights; but this can be changed by the user. The selection of people that have edit rights for a learning design can be done individually or by groups of community members. To facilitate this, LdShake enables the creation of groups by defining a name for a group and indicating the selection of members. Moreover, as requested by user groups in our design-based research process section 2. Sharing with others with editing rights, all members of the community can view the learning design.

Exploration of learning designs accessible at least with view rights can be also done by means of browsing functions. Browsing can make use of filters based on the learning design template or tool used for their creation, as well as of filters based on tags Figure 8A. The list of tags available for filtering includes numbers indicating how many learning designs are categorized using such tags. ILDE also integrates a contextual help that offers short explanations of the menu options. The demonstration of ILDE features in the previous section and the functional system available online shows that the development of the envisaged environment is possible.

On the other hand, the design of ILDE has been done considering user needs in iterations. Yet, this section responding to phase C in Figure 1 presents the methodology and results of the ILDE evaluation with users, aimed to understand to what extent the provided system is able to support the whole learning design cycle with community support in a usable and useful way. Apart from the users' perceptions, it was also acknowledged that the information provided by users during the application of this model can be complemented with other data, such as data automatically tracked by the system itself.

ILDE tracks the total number of times each user activates each function, and collects additional information such as the number of learning designs started by participants, including those that haven't been saved. In the context of the workshops a user could also be a group of users working together with a single user identifier during the workshops. This information was used mainly to assess the trustworthiness of users' opinions. Participants were recruited, using a convenience sampling technique practitioners voluntarily choosing to participate in the trainings , at the five educational institutions described in section 2.

Participants' distribution per sectors was 34 Higher Education, 31 Vocational Training, 34 Adult Education and 8 others. Their expertise in the learning design field was rather basic. Most of them As far as motivation is concerned, respondents had to rate their agreement about a set of statements related to motivation.

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Enactors were 4 vocational teachers, 5 adult educators, 4 higher educators. The data about the users' perceptions were collected through questionnaires after the workshops and interviews after the enactment: Figure 9 shows the overall evaluation methodology adopted at this stage. The achievement of the main research objective addressed by this paper can be evaluated by answering the two evaluation questions depicted in Figure 9 and already mentioned above i.

In order to answer those two questions, it is necessary to obtain a set of high-level indicators, clustered in three categories: The high-level indicators are obtained by aggregating a set of low-level indicators referred to the different ILDE functions, contained in the responses to questionnaires, interview transcripts and tracked data from ILDE logs. The 13 interviews with enactors that is, workshop participants who deployed their learning designs into VLEs and use them in real contexts were aimed at collecting information about the impact of our workshops according to Guskey's model Guskey, , which encompasses 5 levels of evaluation for a training event for teachers: Enactors interview data in the five contexts, together with other data collected from workshop participants who did not take part to enactment, allowed us to complement and consolidate the data obtained from the TAM, thus hopefully reducing their possible bias.

Similarly to the previous phase testing in practice, see section 2. As already mentioned, these data were complemented with the actions tracked in ILDE log files, both during the workshops and during the enactment of ILDE-created learning designs.

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In order to investigate the ability of the ILDE to support the whole learning design life cycle, we explored separately each of the ILDE functions related to such life cycle, namely: As far as Conceptualization functions are concerned, most of the tools were extensively explored by the workshop participants data from the log files shows that participants started a total of learning designs with Persona Card, with Design Narrative, and more than 30 learning designs were started with Design Patterns, Factors and Concerns and Heuristic Evaluation each.

This means that most of the ILDE Conceptualization functions were extensively used and this allowed us to rely on the feedback obtained as trustworthy assuming that feedback on functions that were used too little is less trustworthy than feedback on functions that were extensively used. As shown in Figure 10 , all the functions obtained satisfying ratings overall mean for ease-of-use: This makes the evaluation results of the Conceptualization functions very satisfactory.

Participants' opinions about the conceptualization functions. It is interesting to note that two of the tools were explored almost exclusively in only one of the contexts the Image upload and the custom Vocational Training Template in Greek, in the vocational training sector.

Examples of embedding maths, English and digital skills when teaching and The Functional Skills of maths, English and ICT are often embedded in learning them to a virtual learning environment, website, app or electronic portfolio. for embedding functional skills on vocational courses in offender learning for embedding Functional Skills in a prison environment, i.e. HMP Oakwood.

In the case of the Authoring functions see collection of Table A2 in Supplementary Material , Web Collage was more extensively explored 66 answers and log files reports learning designs started during the workshop , while OpenGLM collected far less responses 7 answers and 1 designed created by a team of users according to the log files. Hence, even if overall averages in both cases were remarkably high, we concentrate here mainly on the quantitative data about Web Collage. In particular, mean rating for ease-of-use was 3. Besides, no statistical differences emerged across the three contexts [ease of use: Regarding OpenGLM, the qualitative comments indicated a positive attitude toward the tool by those participants that explored it.

The three Implementation functions were extensively explored: Statistical tests did not provide any evidence of differences across educational sectors. The ability of the ILDE to provide an adequate community support was investigated mainly through the evaluation of the Sharing and Browsing functions. From the statistical tests performed, no significant differences emerged across the sectors in any of the functions. No significant differences among educational sectors were detected by the statistical tests conducted see collection of Table A5 in Supplementary Material.

From the qualitative data, we detected a general satisfaction about ILDE that reflects the good ratings presented so far. The most used words to describe the system included: This is a very important element from the perspective of the research conducted, as it confirms from the practitioners' perspective this distinctive feature of ILDE the covering of the whole learning design life cycle , which represents an important advance in the field of learning design.

Overall, the quantitative data showed that ILDE was generally considered easy-to-use, but respondents mentioned several aspects as potentially improvable. This had already emerged from the first round of evaluation and the ratings regarding usability were higher at the second round, but from the analysis of the qualitative answers we understand that there is a need for further improvement; especially as far the last steps of implementation and guidance across functions.

As mentioned in the previous section, the data collected about the enactments referred to Guskey's model indicators and for this reason they are not directly comparable with the data collected from workshop participants. However, these data confirm a positive attitude of enactors toward the ILDE and, more generally, toward what they had learnt during the workshops.

Another emerging aspect to improve had to do with language: Finally, data collected from workshop participants who chose not to run any enactment support the hypothesis that the main reasons for this choice did not lie with ILDE usability, but rather with time i. Results indicate that ILDE is able to support practitioners in covering the whole learning design life cycle, providing flexibility by offering multiple approaches to conceptualization and authoring, and the possibility of deploying the learning designs in diverse VLEs. The usefulness and usability of ILDE community support was highly valued by the participants with higher ratings for usefulness , both in terms of the sharing functions that enable co-edition, commenting, or duplication of learning designs for their reuse, and of the browsing functions that facilitate the exploration of the learning designs in the community.

The lack of significant differences in the ratings collected across the three educational sectors shows that ILDE equally fits the needs of the three contexts. This may be due to the flexibility provided by the multiple options for conceptualization, authoring and implementation and by the different levels of collaboration supported by the community functions. The feedback emerged from this evaluation has also led to additional refinements to ILDE.

Browsing functions were extended allowing users to sort learning designs by title alphabetically or by last edition date. Contextual help explaining the specific terminology has also been improved. ILDE is a complex tool that integrates a wide array of existing learning design tools, and its use requires a certain degree of familiarization. Evaluation data obtained during this MOOC indicate that participants' level of comfort using ILDE increases substantially once they become more familiar the system.

To support these MOOCs, additional conceptualization templates were integrated e. Besides, to provide more options for authoring, several steps have been already carried out for the integration of additional authoring tools. Further research will be needed to study whether the use of authoring tools that include also conceptualization scaffolding e. To enhance the support for implementation, ILDE has been refined to support duplication of implementations so that they can be adapted for different cohorts of students and the communication between GLUE!

PS and LdShake has been improved in terms of performance. The main contribution of this paper has been to articulate an integrative approach to flexible learning design, and to enable it by means of an extensible architecture. The developed ILDE integrates and extends a collection of learning design tools to enable collaboration between practitioners for sharing and co-editing both conceptualizations and fully-fledged authored learning designs of different kinds mostly in the context of a single web user interface , and allowing the automatic implementation of authored learning designs into VLEs.

This is a significant contribution to the learning design technologies field, since previous existing tools only covered one phase of the cycle, offer one specific approach to learning design or provide limited support for community collaboration. ILDE is functional, several installations and its source code are open and available.

Both the achieved product and its use by practitioners in training workshops and actual educational contexts diverse educational sectors answer our research question, by showing that it is possible to provide a community system for practitioners that flexibly supports the full learning design life cycle. Results after practical use highlight the usefulness of ILDE functions and show that the selection of the integrated design options accommodates the needs of the participants and their institutions.

These results indicate that ILDE overcomes some of the challenges in learning design identified in the literature. This work also opens directions for future research and product development. We expect that the integrative approach proposed, and the results obtained after using the developed environment by practitioners in diverse contexts, help sharpen insights into support for flexible learning design cycles. The architecture and environment provided may inspire other researchers, for example, in investigating the role of particular learning design techniques framed in the context of more holistic design processes and in combination with other design strategies and tools.

This paper may also inspire other educational technology researchers and developers, helping them understand the complexity of learning design and propose better tooling. Implications include the need of guidance across learning design tools or of interoperability to support flows of learning design artifacts across multiple conceptualization and authoring tools. There are also implications for the training of practitioners; ILDE can help investigations around practice-based teaching training and delve into additional challenges in learning design.

An ethics approval for this research was not required at the time the research was conducted as per the involved Institutions' guidelines and national regulations and written informed consent was obtained from all research participants.

DH-L led the conception of the environment, the user-centered design methodology, and drafted the manuscript; JA-P contributed to the conception of the environment, the collection of data, and edited the manuscript; MD contributed to the conception of the environment, analyzed data and edited the manuscript; FP and DP conceived the evaluation methodology based on TAM, analyzed data and edited the manuscript; JC contributed to the conception of the environment and edited the manuscript; LP contributed to the conception of the environment, designed figures and edited the manuscript.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors acknowledge the contributions from other project members, including the developers: The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: The use of a visual learning design representation to support the design process of teaching in higher education.

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Integrating functional skills with learning

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