DEVELOPING E-LEARNING LESSONS

Pierfranco Ravotto - ITSOS “Marie Curie”

Index

Towards a Knowledge Society....................................................................................................................... 2

Online learning scenarios............................................................................................................................... 3Two types, four scenarios............................................................................................................................. 3Relations with learning materials and with people in different scenarios.......................................................3eLearning and the Internet potential.............................................................................................................. 4Planning eLearning: learning materials and environments............................................................................4

Materials suitable for eLearning................................................................................................................... 5The functions of materials in traditional Distance Learning..........................................................................5The functions of materials in vitual class and collaborative learning environments.......................................5Learning Object and Standards..................................................................................................................... 5SCOs and SCORMs...................................................................................................................................... 6Meta Data..................................................................................................................................................... 7

Types of Learning Objects............................................................................................................................. 7Lessons......................................................................................................................................................... 7Interactive lessons........................................................................................................................................ 7Tests and exercises with electronic feedback................................................................................................8Individual work............................................................................................................................................ 8Project work................................................................................................................................................. 8

Developing materials in the view of Open Source.........................................................................................8

Works Cited................................................................................................................................................... 10

Towards a Knowledge Society

Planning and developing effective eLearning materials is one of the elements that can help achieve one of the objectives set by the Lisbon European Council, March 2002:“The Union has today set itself a new strategic goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”1.It is just after that Council that the European Commission launched the eLearning Action Plan in March 2001 where eLearning is defined as “the use of new multimedia technologies and the Internet to improve the quality of learning by facilitating access to resources and services as well as remote exchanges and collaboration 2.…The first aim of the eLearning initiative is to accelerate the deployment in the European Union of a high quality infrastructure at a reasonable cost. With this in mind, it adopts and adds to the objectives of eEurope, namely:

to provide all schools with access to the Internet and multimedia resources by the end of 2001, and to equip all classrooms with a fast Internet connection by the end of 2002;

to connect all schools to research networks by the end of 2002;

to achieve a ratio of 5-15 pupils per multimedia computer by 2004;

to ensure the availability of support services and educational resources on the Internet, together with online learning platforms for teachers, pupils and parents, by the end of 2002;

to support the evolution of school curricula with the aim of integrating new learning methods based on information and communication technologies by the end of 2002.”3

Even if the objectives set for 2002 were probably too ambitious and have not been totally achieved yet, it is clear that schools and teachers are now required to make a big effort in terms of planning, training and changing of attitudes in order to be able to manage, at its best, the emerging new learning context. Elearning is not and cannot be any longer a field of interest only for those who have been involved in Distance Learning: it is now the time to integrate face-to-face learning and eLearning.

This is the context where the theme of developing e-learning lessons places itself and it is the subject of the present contribution which originates from the following experiences:

teaching activities and didactic/pedagogical research carried out by ITSOS “Marie Curie” in Cernusco in the last 30 years with their 1300 students,

the delivery of e-learning activities integrating face - to- face dimension implemented by more and more teachers in the last decade,

the SiR Net, with 7 nodes and 5000 users, developed, managed and implemented by ITSOS in cooperation with numerous Milanese schools. Such a net has proved to be a powerful tool for eLearning and Collaborative Learning for hundreds of teachers,

the research on ODL and eLearning issues done by ITSOS, as a promoter, in cooperation with numerous Italian and European partners in the European projects SOFIA, Sofi@net and SOLE within Leonardo da Vinci Programmme,

experiences derived from the SiR 2 project, financed by European Social Funds and carried out by ITSOS within an Italian partnership. On such an occasion 120 teachers have been trained,

last but not least, the activities performed in the BiTE project where eLearning materials for mathematics have been developed.

This report is the result of reflections on the experiences carried out and it aims to identify and overcome their limits and offer useful hints for further projects.

1 Lisbon European Council, 23 and 24 march 2000, Presidency conclusions, <http://europa.eu.int/european_council/conclusions/index_en.htm>

2 eLearning Action Plan, March 2001, eLearning Action Plan.pdf, page 2

3 eLearning Action Plan, March 2001, eLearning Action Plan.pdf, page 3

Online learning scenarios

Learning always occurs in a relational context. The learner establishes relations, as the case may be, with the learning materials, with the teacher that is delivering the course or with the tutor supporting his/her training, and finally with the peer group that shares his/her own experience.ELearning materials require to be suitable for the context where they will be used; such a context can be either imposed by circumstances or chosen by the training designers.

Two types, four scenarios

As we wrote, at the conclusion of a project which offered an eLearning course to 120 teachers –over 95% of them successfully completed it after a nine-month activity!!- “ it is possible to identify 2 fundamental types of eLearning”:

Individual Such a type allows the maximum of opening –up and flexibility, both in terms of objectives and content, and time ( its beginning and end, its duration).The path can be tailorised according to the specific trainees’ needs.Obviously, trainees are “alone” in their learning path as there is no a peer group they can establish relations with and whom/by whom they can give/receive support. Two different scenarios can be identified: Self-learning: where no tutorship is foreseen or it is limited to guidance aspects

concerning the definition of the course or the use of ICTs; learning materials are in charge of delivering the content.

Supported self-learning: where a systematic relation with the tutor occurs and it also concerns learning contents.

Group One of the big advantages of group learning is represented by the reciprocal support and incitement that the participants can offer one another.In order to work in group it is obviously necessary to share objectives and contents as well as deadlines; the extent of “freedom” is inferior to the one experienced in individual learning paths. ELearning provides more flexibility than face-to-face learning that asks for an identical schedule (only chats or web conferencse require learners to be connected at the same time).Nevertheless, it is necessary to share the same phases of work and consequently the same deadlines. Also in this case it is possible to identify two scenarios: Virtual class: where the peer group follows a path that is somehow pre-defined

and that is based on learning materials prepared in advance, with a tutor whose role is similar to the one of a teacher in a face-to-face situation.

Online collaborative learning: where the content to learn is not pre-defined, but on the contrary the learners themselves share a task to be fullfilled or a result to be achieved and they organise themselves searching for available information and learning contents that are being defined step by step and that are relevant to the goal.

Here, the tutor plays the role of a consultant or of a “project manager”, just the same role that he/she would play in a face-to face class involved in a project work.

Relations with learning materials and with people in different scenarios

In a self-learning scenario learning materials obviously need to be “complete” and “self-consistent”, as they are required to perform several functions such as:

to delivery content (possibly in an interactive/dialogue form),

to provide and support motivation,

to allow electronic self- check and feedback.

Also in a supported self-learning scenario the learning materials represent the main tool to deliver content, but the increased tutor presence in the learning path, reduces the need to develop complete and self-consistent didactic materials also performing functions of support, check and feedback.

This is even more evident in a virtual class scenario where the presence of a “teacher” is necessarily predominant and where any trainee can benefit by the support and the feedback provided by the group.

In a collaborative learning scenario learning materials mostly consist of mere “proposals of work” and informative charts that will be enriched, during the course, with new materials developed by the group of learners themselves.

The figure points out the loss – from a scenario to another – of the weight of the learning materials while, on the contrary, the weight of the relations among the people increases.

eLearning and the Internet potential

The first two scenarios correspond to traditional Distance Learning for which the Internet represents a priceless tool, as it allows:

to “edit” and make learning materials available at the same time, solving the problems connected to their distribution that previously required face-to –face meetings or the use of traditional mail services.

an easy communication between the learner and the tutor thanks to e-mailing, chatting and web conferencing.

The last two scenarios are those that better match the real potential of the Internet. What is the Internet namely? According to David Weinberger “the net is a social place that we, the human beings, have voluntary created starting from our own passions in order to show the others how the world appears to each other’s eyes …In the web there are only passions, words and the presence of the others in an inextricable jumble of relations continuosly changing.” 4

Passions and relations among people: the ideal scenario for learning. This the reason why the Internet allows a learning environment the potential of which is more powerful than the one exploited in Distance Learning. The Internet can help integrate and enrich face-to-fece learning as it allows the increase of relations between teachers and learners and among learners, and as a consequence, of learning opportunities.

Planning eLearning: learning materials and environments

Elearning paths exploiting the full potential of the Internet require:

learning materials,

a learning environment,

a teacher/tutor that, according to the pedagogical/methodological strategy chosen, interacts with learners.

The people who have been involved in Distance Learning need now to shift their own attention from the learner-material relation to learner-teacher and learner-learner relations.On the contrary, the ones who are familiar with a face-to-face dimension need to transfer the didactic methodologies that proved to be effective in such an environment to a different one, which has its own features.In any case the main role in eLearning is played by a figure called e-moderator by Gilly Salmon.Such a role passes over the tutor’s role in traditional distance learning and is more similar to the role played by a teacher in a face-to-face scenario.It is the e-moderator that “makes – as Gilly Salmon writes - the online world a creative, happy, productive and relevant place for successful learning.… Successful online learning depends on teachers and trainers acquiring new competencies, on their becoming aware of its potential and on their inspiring the learners, rather than on mastering the technology”5.

4 Weinberger David, Arcipelago WEB, Milano, Sperling & Kupfer Editori, 2002, pages 206 and 212

5 Gilly Salmon, Prefazione al libro E-moderating. The Key to Teaching and Learning Online, http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/extracts.htm

Materials suitable for eLearning

From now on, the present report will only focus on the first of the following three elements: learning materials, environment, role of the teacher.

The functions of materials in traditional Distance Learning

In traditional distance learning the limited presence of the tutor and the lack of a peer group ask for materials able to perform a large number of functions:

delivery of content,

check on learning,

correction of mistakes,

suggestions for in-depth study and modifications of the learning path,

support to motivation.

Materials need to be exhaustive, clear, motivating, the most attractive and interactive as possible, and they are generally required to be fully planned and developed before the beginning of the course.Materials form a complete, organic and highly structured courseware also containing the didactic stragey chosen and the learning path offered, with a certain extent of flexibility if required.

The functions of materials in vitual class and collaborative learning environments

In a virtual class scenario the large extent of interaction between the learner and the teacher/tutor and among the learners themselves allows the materials:

not to make up for functions that can be more effectively performed by relations among people

to be partially modified or developed during the course in order to make them meet the learners’needs whenever they arise.

Not only are highly structured materials necessary any longer, but they also could constitute a limit to the fullfillment of the teacher’s function, that is the one of an e-moderator that chooses, adapts and develops content and proposals of work according to the course development.A collection of Learning Objects is much more suitable to the goal. They require to be:

adaptable,

re-usable,

sharable,

transferable.

All this is even more valid if a collaborative learning scenario is to be chosen.

Learning Object and Standards

The most recent pedagogical research in the e-learning field just focuses on these learning objects, or “chunks”, namely blocks of knowledge, or Lego blocks – a terminology used on both sides of the Atlantic.With regard to this, we have to cope with the problem of standardisation. The Masie Centre, one of the organisations involved in such a theme writes: “The phrase “learning standards” is one of the most powerful and most misunderstood aspects of the e-Learning revolution. As organizations make significant investments in digital learning content, there is a strong desire to have greater assurances, portability and re-usability. As organizations focus on providing learners with the “just right” content and activities, there is a

strong desire to have the ability to more easily store, search, index, deploy, assemble and revise content. All of these hopes are part of the story of “learning standards”6.

“Standards help to ensure the five abilities … and to protect and even nurture e-Learning investments:1. Interoperability – can the system work with any other system?2. Re-usability – can courseware (Learning Objects or “chunks”) be re-used?3. Manageability – can a system track the appropriate information about the learner and the content?4. Accessibility – can a learner access the appropriate content at the appropriate time?5. Durability – will the technology evolve with the standards to avoid obsolescence?”7

Researches carried out by centres and universities have met the needs of organisations like the U.S. Defence Department that, after having purchased courseware from various companies, found out its incompatibility, swift obsolescence and non re-usability. This lead to the creation of organisations involved in the standardisation of LOs.8.

SCOs and SCORMs

The ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) initiative has been promoted by the U.S. Department of Defence and by partner companies in order to ensure that training technologies and contents could be used, shared and re-used in the whole aeronautical sector.ADL, along with other partners, has developed SCORM, SCO Reference Model, which are guidelines for planning and developing training contents, called SCOs, Sharable Content Objects.)Such a Reference Model allows contents, technologies and systems to communicate with one another guaranteeing:

inter-operability, that is independence from the Learning Management System (LMS) used,

re-usability,

user-friendliness.

The ADL model focuses on the concept of Sharable Content Object, SCO.A Sharable Content Object (SCO) is a Learning Object with the smallest level of granularity of learning contents that can be tracked (with the double meaning of “traced” and “follow the tracks”) in a Learning Management System9 (LMS) and developed according to the SCORM indications.

A SCO:

6 The Maisie Centre/eLearning Consortium, Making sense of Learning, Specifications and Standards, A decision Maker’s Guide to their Adoption,

March 8 2002, pdf document, pag. 2 (www.masie.com)

7 Ibidem, pag. 8

8 These organizations are worth mentioning:

ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) iniziative

AICC (Aviation Industry Computer-based Training Committee)

ALIC (Advanced Learning Infrastructure Consortium)

ARIADNE (Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe)

CEN/ISS (European Committee for Standadization /Information Society Standardization System)

EdNA (Education Network Australia)

DCMI (Dublin Core Meta-Data Iniziative) GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials)

IEEE – LTSC (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Learning Technologies Standards Committe)

IMS (Instructional Management System) Global learning Consortium

ISO (International Organisation for Standardization)

Prometeus (PROmoting Multimedia access to Education and Training in the European Society)

To know more see Progetto SOLE, Guida 4

9 A LMS is a software that automatically manages the learning activities offering lists of courses, registering users and storing

information on their courseware activities.

contains one or more assets (texts, images, sounds, Web pages, assessment tools, or any other information suitable to be delivered on-line),

can be described by meta-data (see the following paragraph),

can be launched by the SCORM run-time environment (see further) in order to communicate with the Learning Management System,

cannot, by itself, launch other SCOs.

But, above all, a SCO with such characteristics can be used in different contexts; it can be used repeatedly in the production of didactic materials.

Meta Data

The exchange and re-utilization of Learning Objects, in terms of integration, are possible not only if the model in the production phase is accepted but also if they are traceable. They must be properly catalogued into Databases, in other words they need to be quickly retraceable.How to achieve such a result? By means of meta-data, namely data related to data providing information on other data.Meta-data, in the e-learning field, must describe the Learning Objects effectively in order to find, assemble and deliver the right contents to the people who require them at the right time. (“the right learning content to the right person at the right time”).Meta-data can ideally describe all the different Learning Objects, from the smallest ones, the Assets, to the SCOs up to Modules, courses, and whole curricula. They can also be used for the trainees (name, address, learning preferences, skills…)In order for the meta-data to be used by different people/organisations there must be a standard definition and there are institutions in charge of this: IMS for specific definitions and IEEE for certification.

Types of Learning Objects

Let’s analyse now what types of Learning Objects we can develop.

Lessons

Both online and in a face-to-face dimension there are precise contents that are to be delivered to the learners: facts, descriptions, rules, principles, laws, procedures…..Lessons are to be developed in the form of texts accompanied by images, drawings, sounds and movies.

Interactive lessons

Lessons that simply “explain” are less effective than interactive lessons, where the learners are requested to “act”. For example, in the BiTE project, we have developed online learning lessons of mathematics using a software called Cabrì in order to create Web pages where learners can:

move straight lines or rotate them to find out the relations among the direction coefficients of parallel, or symmetrical and perpendicular lines,

change the coordinates of two points on a given straight line to verify that the incremental ratio do not change,

move the tangent along a curve to identify the correlation between the sign of the tangent direction coefficient and the increase or decrease of the function.

More generally speaking, it is possible to draw electrical circuits, to move objects, to order sequences, to link elements……in order to enrich “illustrative” lessons with applications or to alternate deductive and inductive appoaches. As Francesca Berengo has written in an article about BiTE results: “More and more and particularly for difficult concepts traditional face-to-face lessons are being replaced with lessons suitable to make learners get involved in an active way. The teacher provides learners with problems and questions, leads them to a

discussion that encourages them to find answers on their own. Once the solutions are found they are synthetized and systematized. Such guided activities can be implemented as WEB pages that, stimulating reflections, encourage e learners to search for solutions in an independent way.”10

Tests and exercises with electronic feedback

Still in the view of proposing a non passive learning, there is the possibility to develop self-check tests and other activities equipped with electronic help and feed-back, scores and evaluation of results.

Individual work

The presence of a tutor, able to intervene providing corrections and suggestions, also allows the development of “open exercises”, for example written exercises in a foreign language, or maths problems, that are to be sent directly to a tutor, or to a forum if it is required that the “products” are to be seen by the whole class in order to make corrections useful for many.

Project work

Proposals of work can address a group of learners, or a whole class. They are suitable for encouraging online discussions. They can be comments on a poem or on a book or the solution of a complex problem provided by several individual contributions. Such proposals may lead to a research in the Internet, and once the results have been revised, these can be developed as new online lessons or a WEB siteProject work could also propose a case-study, or the creation of a programme, the planning of an electronic devise, the setting up of a business plan…

Developing materials in the view of Open Source

A new movement called Open Source has been impetuously establishing itself these years :“The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.…Open source software is an idea whose time has finally come. For twenty years it has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it's breaking out into the commercial world, and that's changing all the rules. Are you ready?”11

The Free Software movement– as some people go on calling it– seemed destined to bring strong but minority ideas:

transparence against trade secret,

copyleft against copyright,

cooperation against competition,

emphasis on the idea of community - community of software developers, community of users - against individualism.

Such a movement, led by Richard Stallman, places itself between the late hippy and the underground movements; a group of hackers that reject the rules of the establishment and of the market, and share an unselfish passion for technology, for “pure” research. This movement, against all expectations, has forcefully entered the market, in fact the software developed in such a way appers to be the best: Linux is becoming the most widespread operative system, companies disseminating it are listed at the Stock Exchange, titanic companies like IBM have shifted to open source, the interest of the European and Chinese market for it is increasing.

10 Francesca Berengo, Trasferire in rete le strategie efficaci dell’insegnamento in presenza: Il progetto BiTE, CERFAD

11 OSI (Open Source Iniziative), http://www.opensource.org/

A movement with an increasing attraction that places itself as an example to follow.

Well then, why shouldn’t we follow such an example?

We said that eLearning requires a collection of Learning Objects with specific features: they must be adattable, re-usable, sharable, transferable, in conformity with standards and with the presence of an online teacher/tutor that is allowed to choose, select, modify and use them according to the objectives, the target, the didactic strategy chosen and the learners’ response. But which teacher will ever be able to develop such a collection? Or which school will be able to produce it? And why on earth will each teacher, each school have to start out again from the very beginning developing materials that others have already developed employing time, human and financial resources?The Open Source and Copyleft movement foresees that everybody is free to use and modify software/products provided that they entitle any other the same right. (Gnu General Public Licence 12).

Here is a possible answer: schools and teachers can cooperate placing the Learning Object developed at the others’ disposal so that the collection will be likely to boost and develop: people improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs.

Why not?

Author

Ing. Pierfranco RavottoITSOS “Marie Curie”Via Masaccio 4, 20063 Cernusco sul Naviglio (MI) - Italypierfranco.ravotto@tes.mi.it

12 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Works Cited

Berengo Francesca , Trasferire in rete le strategie efficaci dell’insegnamento in presenza: Il progetto

BiTE, CERFAD

Bocchetti, Carlo Lucio and Pierfranco Ravotto. “Il Progetto SiR2: Intranet regionale per la didattica e

la formazione in rete - Documento Conclusivo”. Documento_conclusivo.pdf. T&S. ITSOS

Marie Curie. 15 November 2003. <www.tes.mi.it/sir2portale>

eLearning Action Plan, March 2001. eLearning Action Plan.pdf

<http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/com/cnc/ 2001/com2001_0172en01.pdf>, 22 nov 2003

GNU General Public Licence, <www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>

Lisbon European Council, 23 and 24 march 2000, Presidency conclusions. Europa, The European

Union on-line, 25 November 2003

<europa.eu.int/european_council/conclusions/index_en.htm>

OSI (Open Source Iniziative), <www.opensource.org>, 25 November 2003

Salmon Gilly, Prefazione al libro E-moderating. The Key to Teaching and Learning Online,

<www.atimod.com/e-moderating/extracts.htm>

SOLE Project, Guide 4, Methodologies and Instruments for Planning and Developing Online

Learning Materials. Guide_4_EN.pdf, T&S

< www.tes.mi.it/sole/English/download/download.htm>

The Maisie Centre/eLearning Consortium, Making sense of Learning, Specifications and Standards, A

decision Maker’s Guide to their Adoption, March 8 2002, pdf document, <www.masie.com>,

25 June 2003

Weinberger David, Arcipelago WEB, Milano, Sperling & Kupfer Editori, 2002