Improving the pedagogical expressiveness of IMS LD

The IMS Learning Design specification (LD) was introduced in order to describe any learning and teaching scenario in a formal way. Its high level of generality, however, may make it difficult for teachers and instructional designers to apply it to their learning and teaching scenarios. This limitation suggests the need to explicitly separate and identify the roles of learner and teacher, identify more carefully the teaching activities of evaluation and feedback, and integrate more fully learning objectives into learning activities. The paper suggests an expanded IMS LD model to make the learning and teaching components more explicit. Benefits and impacts of an improved model include reuse of learning content, automated processes for metadata creation and search, providing additional detail to the participating teacher and learner descriptions, increasing the granularity for such descriptions, and making more precise the different steps in the learning and teaching process by defining relevant data and structures such as competence, evaluation, artefact, and feedback.