Educational Modelling Language and Learning Design: new challenges for instructional re-usability and personalized learning

Abstract

Learning technologies offer new challenges to the rapidly growing demand for more constructivist ways of learning (like competency-based, collaborative or adaptive learning). They could, for instance, play a catalyst role in a more effective exchange and reuse of learning objects to enable personalized learning. This article establishes to what extent current learning technologies specifications contribute to educational change, to actual sharing and reuse in educational practice. This article furthermore explains why we need an Educational Modelling Language centered around learning activities to give instructional meaning to learning objects. It is concluded that specifications for learning objects have been primarily designed to insure inter-operability at a rather low infrastructural level (e.g., test items, meta-data), focusing on technology issues and reuse of learning objects. Now adoptability issues are beginning to call for a pedagogical framework at a higher infrastructural level (e.g., a complete course), focusing on the instructional value and reuse of learning activities, like in the new Learning Design (LD) specification. LD enables the description of both learning content and processes within ‘units of learning’ from a variety of pedagogical perspectives (both objectivist and constructivist).