The composer: creating, sharing and facilitating learning designs

Abstract

Developing tools for sharing learning designs is a well-established, but still on-going endeavour in the technology-enhanced learning domain. However, to date tools supporting educational modelling languages have not achieved wide adoption in school practice. In this chapter we report on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a pedagogical tool referred to as the Composer. The Composer supports the composition of learning designs activities and has been developed according to design principles such as (a) interoperability between design-time and run-time systems based on the W3C Widget Standard, (b) inclusion of artefact types beyond content such as tools, people and events, (c) a user-friendly authoring environment. An evaluation of the proof-of-concept implementation suggests that the tool is easy-to-use and provides added value for teachers when it comes to reflecting about Learning Designs.