Analysis of tools and methods for describing and sharing reusable pedagogical scenarios

Abstract

Even without rigorous empirical research, we know that some teachers are more effective in their teaching approaches than others. We can hypothesise that part of their success can be attributed to the pedagogical methods or scenarios they use, and that these scenarios could also be re-used by other teachers. But it is quite complicated to describe good teaching practices, methods and approaches so that these can easily be adopted by other teachers. Today, several different tools and methods exist for describing and sharing effective pedagogical scenarios, but their biggest disadvantage is a low rate of acceptance among teachers. The paper provides an overview of the state of the art in the domain of software tools for building and sharing pedagogical scenarios, using a two-dimensional analytic framework. As an outcome of this analysis, design guidelines for an alternative scenario-building tool are proposed.