Briefing Paper: Lesson Plans

This paper provides context for the Lesson Plans activity within the Technical Standards for Digital Education project.

The aim is to provide background and provide a framework for eliciting feedback from the focus group on business requirements, possible technical approaches, and priorities for engagement with standards and specifications bodies.

This document is a work in progress: it will be expanded in collaboration with the focus group for this activity.


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Business drivers

  1. School sector jurisdictions have raised the requirements for sharing lesson plans across learning platforms.
  2. Teachers want to be able to create and share simple “lesson plans” that contextualise the use of content.
  3. An example of an environment in which lesson plans can be created is Scootle, which has proved to be quite popular, with over 20,000 lessons.
  4. Currently Scootle lesson plans are not useable in other learning platforms

Interoperability challenges

  • Use appropriate standards and protocols for transfer of lesson plans from one environment to another.
  • Using a Scootle to Moodle migration as an example, examine challenges in moving lesson plans between environments.
  • Lesson plans that have been created in Scootle are useful to a limited audience. Being able to migrate these to other platforms would expand their usability.

Scenario

A teacher creates a series of lesson plans using the lesson plan feature of Scootle. The teacher has found that these lessons have been very successful in the classroom, and has told colleagues about them. These colleagues are keen to see these lesson plans, but are on a different learning platform to the teacher.

The teacher is able to export the lesson plan from his/her own learning platform in a format which is able to then be imported into a colleagues platform.

Teachers from different schools and different jurisdictions are able to share lesson plans resulting in collaborative improvement of teaching content.

Interoperability and technical analysis

Learning Management Systems

  1. Deployment of digital curriculum content to the classroom has illustrated that teachers find it useful to create and share simple “lesson plans” that contextualise the use of content.
  2. Many learning environments provide the ability to create simple collections / sequences / plans for content usage.
  3. The systems do not, however, allow these plans to be shared between different learning environments.
  4. This is an interoperability issue hindering sharing of valuable teacher created lesson plans both between jurisdictions and within jurisdictions.
  5. TLF has collected sample lesson plans created by teachers using its content.
  6. The lesson plan feature in the Scootle environment is very popular, with over 20,000 lesson plans.
  7. Teachers want to be able to share lesson plans, regardless of the platform.
  8. Jurisdictions have raised requirements for sharing lesson plans across platforms. These may be broad or narrow – located within a single or multiple schools / institutions.
  9. Jurisdictions currently use multiple, varying platforms for storing /utilising content for the classroom. These systems do not necessarily interoperate.
  10. Students benefit from a wide range of potential lesson plans / learning resources.
  11. A Scootle to Moodle migration will be created as a demonstrator prototype of how the principle could work in other environments.

Lesson Plan Migration

  1. What are the requirements for interoperable lesson plans?
  2. What formats and standards exist for transporting lesson plans between learning environments / platforms?
  3. Data exchange between these systems must involve common data formats and must conform to Australian standards and environment.
  4. Being lesson plans, it is unlikely that data is sensitive, although this may need to be taken into account at a later stage.
  5. Data transfer is unlikely to be necessary on a large scale to entities outside the Education sector.
  6. Transferred data must be fully usable in its new environment (ie must adapt in its full capacity to new learning platform).

Relevant Standards and Specifications

Content specifications

  • IMS Common Cartridge – CC-K12 http://www.imsglobal.org/activities.html - IMS has been specifically looking at the Common Cartridge specification would work in a K-12 environment, and what alterations it needs to be able to operate.
  • IMS Learning Design - http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/index.html - IMS has been working on this specification to describe learning design which “supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online learning[…] by providing a generic and flexible language”.

Learning Management Systems

Metadata


The Technical Standards for Digital Education project is funded by the Australian Government's Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR).

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