Codifying Educational Language - Passing it on...

I dread preparing lesson plans. Yet, it's an important step to verbalise the contextualisation of learning to unique audiences. With different batches of learners with disparate learning needs, barriers to learning, learning styles, socio-economical background etc., one could imagine the countless number of lesson plans that would be churned out to support all the learning! Think about this - how wonderful and efficient it would be to be able to share and re-use all these lesson plans without having to modify them heavily for adaptation?

Unfortunately, a lesson plan is no more than a record of the type and sequence of learning activities that occur in a classroom. This could not be readily replicated to other learner groups and even if replicated, the outcomes may not be reproducible as well. Faced with all the variables, how could we then, formulate a common educational language for sharing as most importantly, for educators to be able to re-use and apply the learning activities and the underpinning pedagogies almost instantaneously and effectively?

The answer could be found in Learning Design. Last year, an assembly of learning design experts congregate at Larnaca, Cyprus to collectively concur and produce the 'Larnaca Declaration', a super-long piece of document aimed at defining the crux of Learning Design and on the explicit manifestation of a common and definitive set of 'educational notation' to guide Learning Design and most importantly, to ensure that the design products are poliferated with ease. I briefly skimmed through the document and what really stopped me in my track was the use of music notation as an analogy to suggest the need for development of a similar language to guide the codifcation of implicit knowledge of how teachers teach, the types of actvities chosen, how learners learn etc. and the genrational transfer of such knowledge. I am in full agreement with this sophisicated idea though I do acknowledge that this is an arduous task. 

The document went on to expound the use of LAMS as an effective Learning Design Software system to attempt to capture and make explicit the learning activities and its associated pedagogical approaches. I won't talk about IMS or EML for now but using a LAMS for learning design work enables the user to appreciate the entire architectural flow of design decisions, sequencing and control of learning activities etc. In other words, the system helps one to think aloud a learning design concept. In contrast, a LMS merely serves as a repository where learning activities and resources are simply "parked" and confined to individual classes with minimal opportunities for replication. Will, one could argue that most modern LMS boast the capability of replicating course templates, but really, the course template does not really exhibit any trace of learning design. For instance, learners could easily access all the learning activities such as viewing course lectures, partipating in forum discussions etc. ALL AT THE SAME TIME and hence, there doesn't seem to be a need for extensive design in the course learning. 

I'm not sure if the Larnaca makes mention of this, but in my opinion, I thought that we should also leverage on knowledge management principles, techniques and tools as well to help establish some form of data semantics in the course of harvesting learning design outputs.

Whatever the case is, I thought that the efforts in pushing for a more inclusive and common platform for educational language to take flight were laudable and I really look forward to its fruition one day!

XoXo