An Instructional Engineering Method and Tool for the Design of Units of Learning

Abstract

9.1 Introduction The fast evolution of learning technologies has multiplied the number of decisions one must take to create a distributed learning system (DLS). While it is true that a majority of the first web-based applications have been mostly used to distribute information, more and more educators have become aware of the need to go beyond simple uses of information and communication technologies. This context has generated a much-needed interest for pedagogical methods and, more generally, for the field of In-structional Design (Wiley 2002). The term " Educational Modelling Language " (EML) was first intro-duced in 1998 by researchers at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL), as a response to Instructional Design and pedagogical concerns towards standardization and interoperability needs. The work on Educa-tional Modelling Languages (Koper 2002), and the subsequent integration of a subset in the Learning Design specification (LD 2003), is the most important initiative to date, to integrate Instructional Design preoccupa-tions into the international standards movement. In particular, it describes a formal way to represent the structure of a Unit of Learning and the con-cept of a pedagogical method specifying roles and activities that learners and support persons can play using learning objects. The LD specification leaves open the choice of instructional methods and modelling tools that can support designers in the process of building learning design specification, especially for those aiming at distributed, networked or on-line education. Extensive research and development in the field of Instructional Design has led to a large body of methodologies. One of the approaches is described in the previous chapter. This chapter will elaborate on the work we did in Canada on the Instructional Engineer-ing approach (Paquette 2001a) and the Learning Systems Engineering 162 G. Paquette et al. Method (MISA) 1 . The approach is especially well suited to help designers build LD-compliant Units of Learning. The chapter is structured into four sections. Section 9.2 presents the in-structional engineering viewpoint on the LD specification. Section 9.3 out-lines the MISA instructional engineering method and its relation to LD. Section 9.4 presents the MOT+ graphical representation language and situ-ates MISA/MOT+ as embedding an educational modelling language with its XML machine-readable output. Section 9.5 presents a practical learning design case of a complex unit of learning.