Abstract:

Although blended learning, especially the use of lecture recordings and the sharing of static materials in Virtual Leaning Environments (VLEs), is prevalent in Higher Education, the use of authoring tools to create interactive learning objects is, to varying degrees, less common; often the reasons for which are deemed to be the time-consuming nature of creating such content and the limited access to easy-to-use tools.

It is often customary that authoring and editing interactive online learning objects is done exclusively by specialist content developers, however, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Foundational Legal Skills blended learning course, taken by almost 200 first year undergraduate Law students, was developed using an authoring tool called H5P which was made available to all staff at the university in the form of a plugin in the institution’s VLE.

Easy access and simple editing of the authoring tool granted the authors – the Subject Matter Expert (SME) and the learning technologists – to develop content collaboratively as well as providing the SME with the flexibility to adapt the content in-session, quickly responding to the needs of students as revealed during taught face-to-face sessions. With greater efficiency in core content design and development, learning technologists on the project had greater opportunity to explore and integrate additional external tools and refine the overall instructional design.

The main challenge regarding content development proved to be the creation of meaningful interactive learning objects, given that the course was on a qualitative social sciences subject where often there is no one right answer to questions but instead the focus is on the development of students’ skills to think critically. Therefore, to complement the interactive content that catered for self-paced learning, other elements such as forum discussions, and individual and collaborative writing activities were introduced. For the latter, a cloud-based synchronous tool was integrated. Finally, to connect the different elements, a narrative was created.

Keywords:

Blended learning, authoring tool, interactive content, collaboration, learning technologists, content development.