Widgets and IMS Learning Design

CETIS Conference, 2008

Dai Griffiths

The Institute for Educational Cybernetics, The University of Bolton

Way back in 1992

• Hypercard sank

• WWW emerged

• There is balance between interoperability / usability / functionality which is still with us

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IMS-LD and widgets

• Proposes a language which seeks – an improved balance– a better total performance

• It is a model of the wider problem (to the extent that LD is a good model, and the underlying technology is satisfactory)

• Widgets also look at the balance of interoperability and functionality

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TENCompetence

• Wookie server (architecture by Scott Wilson, developed by Paul Sharples)

• Wookie manages the widgets available, and handles the multiple user functionality

• A widget world to be integrated into LD and others

• Can be used for LD, and for others

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Ask not what widgets can do for LD…

• What can LD do for widgets?

• LD provides a way of defining and running flows of tools, to be made available to different sets of learners, in their roles as they relate to particular activities

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Representation of services in LD

• The actual services for use in a learning context (e.g. wiki or forum) are not specified in IMS-LD.

• Only four generic service are available:– Conference– Monitor– Send Mail– Index Search

• What happens when you run the UOL?6

Previous approaches (1)SCORM integration

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Problems with integrating specific services

• Each new service needs a new adaptor

• Creating the adaptors for a service is hard work

• When the service changes, the adaptors need to be re-written

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Previous approaches (2)

• Integrate the player into a specific Virtual Learning Environment

• The .LRN platform has implemented a player which has access to all the services available in .LRN

• This provides a rich set of services, but is not portable to other platforms.

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Previous approaches (3)

• Independent systems inspired by IMS-LD focused on providing services

• Ambition to export to IMS-LD at a later date

• e.g. – LAMS has a rich set of services, but the IMS-

LD export cannot represent them– “Learning Design Language” provides an

independent specification for services10

Previous approaches (4)

• None of these approaches provides both– a rich set of services – a reasonable degree of portability across

different LD-compliant platforms

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The solution proposed: The Wookie widget server

• In TENCompetence we have developed a widget server (Wookie)

• Supports multi-user widgets

• Uses W3 draft specification

http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/

• Current widgets include forum, chat, vote

• Built in order to resolve the IMS-LD issue, but can be used independently

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A wookie widget in WordPress

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Wookie widgets in Moodle

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IMS-LD and Widgets is a powerful combination

• A UOL can specify – which widgets to make available– when they should be made available– which users should see them in which

contexts

• You can define a complex reusable flow– Give learners the right tools in context– Provision them simply by assigning a role to a

learner

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A generic solution

• The SCORM integration was a single service

• Wookie integration provides a framework for the provision of services

• Widgets are simple to develop (javascript and HTML)

• The complexity of multiple users is handled on the server side

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Integration with the CopperCore IMS-LD Engine

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Authoring• A Wookie server advertises the widgets

which it offers• The author of a UOL can choose which

widgets to include • a parameter is added to the service element

in an environment widget=<type of widget>• Authoring handled transparently by

TENCompetence authoring tool ReCourse

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Authoring in ReCourse

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Extensible, but also portable

• New widgets can be made, or adapted from existing widgets and imported

• Each server may have different widgets– Default set of widgets provided with Wookie– Administrator can set a particular widget as

default for any widget type– Users can expect to find, for example, a forum

on any runtime system, in the flavour determined by the administrator

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Please make use of Wookie and the IMS-LD toolkit

• Open Source

• Available at http://www.tencompetence.org/ldruntime/

• More widgets to come soon– RSS reader– Wiki– …

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