Details to follow.

1. Why has IMS LD not led to the advances which were hoped for? Timothy Goddard*, David Griffiths, Wang Mi *corresponding author: tim@timgoddard.co.uk

2. Background IMS LD hasn’t achieved anything like widespread adoption within education sector. Interviews with participants in IMS LD research. Flaws of the research. Work in progress. Some interesting quotes and initial thoughts.

3. Research Value -v- Adoption Value “I don’t think we achieved our goals with IMS LD but I thought that conceptually it was a very important time and it was the building of a community of people who had a lot of like ideas that helped achieve and influence some other areas of specifications as well.” “It’s kept a group of researchers working together for quite a long time. This is the thing; it always was a useful focus of interest around activity rather than content. It’s a shame we had to do it with this whopping great XML specification because that same conversation could have happened a bit more simply.”

4. Adoption in Practice “I’m not working with IMS LD per se at the moment but I am still working with a lot of the ideas that came out of conversations I had in the IMS LD community. As I mentioned earlier I think that those conversations and the ideas possibly have more value and impact than IMS LD itself.” “The UNFOLD project was a good way in which people were talking through the concepts of designing activities, labelling the sort of activities that were taking place, the distinction between resources and roles. These were all very useful design approaches to how to produce e-learning but didn’t actually need you to then necessarily produce something that was a playable Unit of Learning.”

5. Institutional awareness “…we asked the HE managers … most of them didn’t have any clue about IMS LD. Not just about IMS LD but also about the opportunities of describing teaching practice. Even programme managers had no idea which is kind of weird. We are doing all this research for almost a decade and most of the people in practice have no idea that it even exists.” “the institution has to change to allow a different way for teachers to be. You are given very little time to prepare your lectures and you do it incrementally as you go along.”

6. Is it the specification? The Conceptual Structure of IMS Learning Design Does Not Impede Its Use for Authoring Michael Derntl, Susanne Neumann, David Griffiths, and Petra Oberhuemer

7. What about the tools? “Those that make the users work with the elements of the specification are kind of useless to the broadest potential audience which is the teachers.” “… we need to distinguish between the complexity of the specification and the ease of use of the tools.” “The worst experience is when one of those real teachers using the COLLAGE authoring tool with the templates that I mentioned before wanted to run it. The experience of playing it with a player was not very satisfying from a usability perspective.”

8. Do the systems ask too much? “There was some initial excitement based on the possibility of achieving adaptability. But then the questions popped up: “how do I take this to my Moodle?”; “how can I deploy this tomorrow in my institution?”. The answer we had to give them was that it was complicated, you need a runtime environment, this was running a different LMS, you needed to write your code as a UoL. We didn’t have graphical tools yet and all the difficulties appeared.” “When you document using any process it is because you are hoping that the documentation of the process is going to give you some return on investment at some point in the future. So you don’t go off and document things in a detailed fashion for the sake of documentation …”

9. Interoperability with what? “When the specification was passed we expected that there would be an increasing number of VLEs rather than this massive concentration of the market. The use case for LD being an interoperability specification has kind of disappeared.” “So now the use case is that we have this interoperability specification but really we are using it as a set of functional requirements for systems. This means that adoption becomes very difficult.”

10. What’s the best role for IMS LD? “Currently it’s being sold as a “one spec fits all purposes” kind of thing but it’s simply not true. So I think research needs to be put into very clearly identifying the properties and characteristics of UoLs where IMS LD can be a strong helper.” “For many things you probably won’t need IMS LD. If you do simple sequencing or if you are just rolling out self-study units in a linear sequence then probably IMS Simple Sequencing, SCORM, LAMS or whatever will be enough for you.”

11. What is the teacher’s role? “Even now I think our (the sector's) understanding of what the role of the teacher is and what they do, even in the day-to-day classroom and certainly in the use of the VLE, is not at all clear. I think that caused a problem too. We looked to adopt LD in a context for which it was not really designed and then we found that, unsurprisingly, it had a lot of shortcomings.” “We’ve become too much like engineers and not enough like human beings. It’s quite logical. It’s education as designed by Mr Spock.”

12. Supporting Spontaneity “At design time you have to be over specific for things you probably don’t even know yet and at runtime you cannot do anything … but for most HE teaching contexts, like classic universities, it’s difficult because teaching is more or less a back and forth process introducing new things and being flexible at runtime.” “So designing in the runtime environment is the key to support current practice. The use of the specification would then be somewhat different. It’s not to design once and then run many times. It’s just to design during running and then be able to share this UoL and reuse it again next year and so on.”

13. How does any system capture this? “The kid in the back wants me to define "logic." The girl next to him looks bewildered. The boy in front of me dutifully takes notes even though he has severe auditory processing issues and doesn't understand a word I'm saying. Eight kids forgot their essays, but one has a good excuse because she had another epileptic seizure last night. The shy, quiet girl next to me hasn't done homework for weeks, ever since she was jumped by a knife-wielding gangbanger as she walked to school. The boy next to her is asleep with his head on the desk because he works nights at a factory to support his family. Across the room, a girl weeps quietly for reasons I'll never know. I'm trying to explain to a student what I meant when I wrote "clarify your thinking" on his essay, but he's still confused.” Ellie Herman: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/31/opinion/la-oe-herman-class-size-20110731