Enabling Teachers to Develop Pedagogically Sound and Technically Executable Learning Designs

Abstract

A learning design is a description of a sequence of learning activities that learners undertake to attain some learning objectives, including the resources and services needed to complete the activities. Unfortunately, there exists not a learning design language which can be used by teachers to explicitly describe pedagogical strategies and then can be interpreted by machine. This paper proposes to support teachers’ design processes by providing pedagogy-specific modeling languages for learning design. Based on activity theory, we developed a conceptual framework, which can be used to specify pedagogical semantics and operational semantics of notations of a pedagogy-specific modeling language. We present our approach by using peer assessment as an exemplary pedagogy. Through investigating whether practitioners can describe and understand peer assessment designs and whether the peer assessment designs can be interpreted by machine, we conclude that enriching pedagogical semantics and operational semantics of notations is a promising approach to develop a new generation of learning design languages, which enable teachers to develop pedagogically sound and technically executable learning designs.