Compendium LD: Tool for Course planning

On the last red*ink residential seminar in Tesserete, Ticino, we had the pleasure to have Gráinne Conole (here is her blog) as a speaker. Most interesting – for me – was to get first-hand insights in Gráinne’s everyday work at the Open University UK where she is responsible for e-learning (though she certainly thakes on a very differentiated and open perspecitve on the ‘e’).

A most interesting thing for me is Compendium LD, a smart (and free) little tool for visualizing course designs. After having spent some time working on  a broschure (well, rather redact and re-edit an so long unfinished draft) about how to sensibly design self-study courses, this tool really seems handy for course design. I have already played around a bit and desined a course into the blue. Tomorrow, however, I will test it under „real life conditions“ as I plan to use it for supporting a re-design of an existing course. I hope that (1) the tool will help me to keep track of all the elements of the course fulfilling the demand to arrive at a coherent desing and (2) it will help the lecturer whose course is to be modified to get deeper insights and a better feeling for didactic design processes. See what the tool can do in practice – I will report on my experiences.

Another initiative Gráinne presented is Cloudworks, a platform for exchanging functioning didactic designs but also unsolved problems and open questions. The idea is to build on the experiences of not so successful attempts to set up learning objects repositories etc. So cloudworks features a few functions that aim at building up a rather strong community to reach a critical mass of active users. I am sceptical about it but let’s give it a chance, it certainly is a great idea. So, please register and enter your good and bad practices from your own teaching.

Btw. Gráinne prompted us to do an ad hoc Cloudworks session and jot down some ‘clouds’ (good didadctic concepts) that come to our mind. I briefly described the Augsburg model to teach or rather learn about qualitative research methods. Let’s see perhaps it will be on Cloudworks in the near future.