The Learning Design Specification

The use of general languages such as HTML or proprietary scripting languages to describe learning processes leads to unnecessary difficulty in documenting teaching strategies and reusing elements of existing teaching materials.

Abstract

A learning design can be described with the sentence “people in specific groups and roles engage in activities using an environment with appropriate resources and services”. To be usable by computers, this language has to be given a concrete syntax and semantics, and this is provided by the Learning Design (LD 2003) specification. The documents which make up the specification can be quite daunting, and this chapter aims to lower the threshold to their comprehension. It starts with some historical background, examines the intended readership for the specification, then provides a reading guide to the specification documents, before giving an overview of the ideas and concepts in LD and how they are intended to work together when used to represent a Unit of Learning (UOL). The overview is intended to make it easier to understand the specification and the dynamics of a running learning design.