Abstract:

Several annual reports express the increasing role of Learning Management Systems (LMS) in the context of Higher Education Institutions (HEI), as primary tools to support learning. However, in most cases, the integration of technology in the teaching-learning process is not being combined with a shift in pedagogical methodologies, and thereby teachers are not taking full advantage of the capabilities offered by these learning environments. This has led to a juncture where LMS are mainly being used as digital libraries for learning contents for students to download.

Therefore, we believe that it is necessary to overcome this notorious tendency for development of content-centered environments, by expanding pedagogical strategies and learning opportunities that support student engagement and active learning. This is not only the biggest challenge of today’s education, but also as a tremendous challenge for teachers, particularly where the rearrangement of new workflows are concerned. Designing and implementing situated or articulated learning activities is a complex and time-consuming process aggravated by the fact that, in general, teachers don’t have the expertise of an instructional designer.

Still, those who undertake the challenge face the difficulty of not having a return on the time and effort they invested: a new semester/year usually represents a new learning context, new learning objectives and new students with different learning styles, to which teachers should adapt new learning strategies and activities. Although LMSs like Moodle offer backup and restore functionalities, they lack the potential to rapidly change learning flows: insert/remove new activities, (re)design new paths, determine or adjust synchronizing points and group formation periods, etc.

We believe that the solution for these problems relies on the design and reuse of online learning scenarios, based on sequences of articulated activities, allowing for the dissemination and presentation of concrete templates for active learning strategies. We are using LAMS together with Moodle, as a coupled-system, thus taking advantage of the well-established LMS and the drag-and-drop capabilities of LAMS, to easily design learning experiences. We also designed a repository of learning scenarios templates created by teachers to be then imported to LAMS and executed in Moodle.

Although it is still in progress, we believe we have a suitable implementation and assessment methodology for this project: in a first phase we use 3 teachers from 3 subject areas, which have to build their own learning scenarios and run them in Moodle with their students. In a second phase, each of the teachers must choose a scenario built by one of their pears to be adopted or adapted to their own context and run it in Moodle again. During and after these phases, interviews, documents, inquiries and system logs are used to assess and measure the proportion of changes between the first and the second scenario, the capacity of a scenario to be used in different areas (inter-subject reuse) and students’ and teachers’ response to the methodology. The purpose is mainly to analyze student engagement and satisfaction, the efficiency of the learning environment to fulfill the learning objectives and the amount of return in terms of time and effort that the rapid change of activity sequences is able to grant teachers.

Keywords:

learning scenarios, lams, moodle, reusability, methodology.