Tweaks, templates and the LMS: exploring how to improve the learning environment#
Published#
Jones, D. (2018). Exploring knowledge reuse in design for digital learning: tweaks, H5P, constructive templates and CASA. In Y. W. Chew, K. M. Chan, and A. Alphonso (Eds.), Personalised Learning. Diverse Goals. One Heart. ASCILITE 2019 Singapore (pp. 139-148).
Rationale#
- Effective learning requires high levels of contextually appropriate TPACK
- There remains a TPACK problem in higher education and its use of digital learning
- Academics - while experts in content - are largely left alone struggle with the act of creating and using digital (primarily web-based) learning environments due to their typically limited technical, multimedia and pedagogical knowledge
- This paper draws lessons from the early stages of a DBR research project at Griffith University seeking to develop ways to help improve the level of TPACK available to academics and subsequently improve the quality of the learning environments and the learning that takes place within them
Misc thoughts#
Blackboard 9.1 is already sort of based on templates e.g. the course contacts. But the problem is that those template haven't evolved. The focus on Bb and others has been on developing the broader systems. Not the individual "templates".
This is where Tweaks come in.
Tweaks also enter the picture because the standard "content item" doesn't provide any scaffolding. It's just HTML. This allows a lot of crap content (e.g. as complained about in the Bb community) but also the flexibility to do their own thing. The same thread that complains about the crap content is the same one in which the people with knowledge boast and share their positive use of the generativity.
The tweaks are a way to develop a constructive template. To reuse the expertise to produce a certain useful display.
But they also suffer from the problem of not having been kept up to date. Perhaps again because of the focus on bigger picture - the inability to learn about the context and perhaps the gulf between the people who know that context and the developers who can do things.
h5p comes in ....
What is missing ... Goodyear and Retalis.