“Learning Design and Open Source Teaching,” the sixth installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on May 16, 2007, by James Dalziel, Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence 1 (MELCOE) and prime mover behind LAMS 2 . Thanks James!
James' posting was organized into two related sections. The first provided some definition for Learning Design as treated in his posting, and the second pointed to the potential of “Open Source Teaching.” James' treatment of Learning Design suggests that Learning Design seeks to describe learning processes along with content, which takes the form of sequences of activities. Although the activities could be of a mixed online and offline nature, much dialog around Learning Design is focused on the technology to automatically run activity sequences. James then points to the potential benefits of Learning Design in terms of collaborative and social learning and activity sequence sharing, which leads into the second section on Open Source Teaching.
James starts the second section of his posting with,
If Learning Designs capture the heart of the education process, then could we, by analogy, call them the”source code” of teaching? And if teachers then share their Learning Designs with each other under opencontent licenses, then does this represent the birth of open source teaching?
He then makes a reference to an article that fleshes out the concept, and quickly dives into the important topic of licensing, particularly around the Non-Commercial (NC) restriction, which had been treated in some previous postings in “FLOSS, OER, Equality and Digital Inclusion” and “WikiEducator: Memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic.”
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