Open teaching: why didactic templates and LMS make a good team

Didac­tic tem­plates make a fun­da­men­tal con­tri­bu­tion to mak­ing learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tems (LMS) more open by enabling teach­ers to make their course designs avail­able to each other and share them — in the spirit of OER. Two added val­ues result from the com­bi­na­tion of didac­tic tem­plates and LMS. That is why we at twillo have decided to pro­vide our own tem­plates for didac­tic teach­ing-learn­ing con­cepts.

Before we come to the added value of using didac­tic tem­plates in learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tems (LMS), we will take a closer look at the rel­e­vant terms OER, didac­tic tem­plates and LMS.

OER

Open Edu­ca­tional Resources (OER) are edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als whose key fea­ture is their open licens­ing, which invites re-use and usu­ally also adap­ta­tion and fur­ther devel­op­ment. Openly licens­ing mate­ri­als with a high level of gran­u­lar­ity, such as entire courses, does not mean mak­ing access to courses and thus the course con­tent (from per­sonal data to com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­tent) pub­lic. Unless the course is delib­er­ately offered as a MOOC. Rather, open pro­vi­sion refers to the learn­ing units.

Didactic templates

Unlike con­crete course tem­plates, which are tai­lored to spe­cific top­ics and tar­get groups, didac­tic course tem­plates are purely method­i­cal and didac­tic course struc­tures that fol­low selected spe­cific teach­ing and learn­ing con­cepts. They can be imple­mented in the dig­i­tal course envi­ron­ments of a learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem using the import func­tion.

While most LMSs offer a weekly struc­ture or a topic struc­ture, the tem­plates map the respec­tive didac­tic con­cepts, which are usu­ally struc­tured in phases or step sequences and have been cre­ated accord­ingly in the LMS course envi­ron­ment.

The course tem­plates con­tain pre­ced­ing sec­tions. In the research-based learn­ing teach­ing con­cept, the research process is divided into eight phases, for each of which a sec­tion is pro­vided in the course area of the LMS. The same applies to the seven steps of prob­lem pro­cess­ing in the Prob­lem-based learn­ing course tem­plate. These course tem­plates help to struc­ture the course area method­i­cally, but still need to be filled with con­tent by teach­ers.

The cre­ated course tem­plates do not have to be used 1:1, but can be indi­vid­u­ally adapted accord­ing to con­tent require­ments or by using spe­cific func­tions of the respec­tive LMS and sup­ple­mented with inter­ac­tive ele­ments, media or tasks.

The pos­si­ble uses are just as var­ied as the con­tent can be designed by the lec­turer. The course tem­plates can either be used for purely online set­tings to pro­vide stu­dents with con­tent and tasks and to enable col­lab­o­ra­tive work among stu­dents; how­ever, they can also be used as an accom­pa­ny­ing struc­ture for reg­u­lar face-to-face courses, pro­vid­ing ori­en­ta­tion and addi­tion­ally guid­ing the learn­ing process. Tem­plates can also be used in the con­text of blended learn­ing — here, the learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem is trans­formed from a PDF desert into a dig­i­tal learn­ing space for asyn­chro­nous and syn­chro­nous phases, thus open­ing up a fur­ther con­crete teach­ing and learn­ing space for learn­ers.

Didac­tic course tem­plates com­bine LMS and OER: On the one hand, the tem­plates (pro­vided by twillo) are them­selves open mate­ri­als that can be adapted to indi­vid­ual con­cerns and spe­cific cases, i.e. to stu­dents. On the other hand, any­one can make courses avail­able to other teach­ers them­selves — not least accord­ing to the motto “The wheel does not always have to be rein­vented”.

LMS

Learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tems (LMS) have become an inte­gral part of higher edu­ca­tion and teach­ing. As an inter­face between teach­ing and admin­is­tra­tion, they bun­dle essen­tial func­tions of the teach­ing-learn­ing process: from the pro­vi­sion of learn­ing mate­ri­als to com­mu­ni­ca­tion between teach­ers and stu­dents as well as between stu­dents them­selves and the orga­ni­za­tion of teach­ing. In teach­ing-learn­ing sce­nar­ios such as the flipped class­room, they can be used to pro­vide stu­dents with mate­ri­als for the learn­ing phase pre­ced­ing the con­tact phase. And this self-learn­ing can be strength­ened in a didac­tic sense by using inter­ac­tive facets of LMS (such as tasks and quizzes) in addi­tion to mere PDFs. In short: LMSs have become indis­pens­able.

Most uni­ver­si­ties use one of the most com­mon LMS such as Moo­dle, ILIAS or Stud.IP. With regard to open edu­ca­tion and open edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als, it is regret­table that LMSs are still largely closed (closed in terms of 1. a lack of or lim­ited access options for peo­ple who are not mem­bers of the uni­ver­sity and 2. inad­e­quate options for import­ing and export­ing edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als). The rea­sons for this are likely to be of a tech­ni­cal and social nature.

Tech­ni­cally: Only a small pro­por­tion of Moo­dle, ILIAS and Stud.IP instances allow their teach­ers to make their mate­ri­als openly avail­able — espe­cially with pub­lic areas or, in the case of Stud.IP, now with the con­nec­tion to twillo. This is regret­table, as teach­ers can openly license their teach­ing and learn­ing mate­ri­als within the LMS in the sense out­lined above and noth­ing would actu­ally stand in the way of pub­lish­ing them as OER. How­ever, in a closed LMS, even mate­ri­als with an open license can still only be accessed by peo­ple who are enrolled in the course or are at least mem­bers of the respec­tive uni­ver­sity. Data pro­tec­tion issues undoubt­edly play a role here, but solu­tions are being found, for exam­ple by link­ing to OER por­tals. For­tu­nately, there have recently been increas­ing efforts to achieve greater open­ness in terms of access and reusabil­ity.

Social: Expe­ri­ence has shown that lec­tur­ers at uni­ver­si­ties who enable the option of mak­ing mate­ri­als pub­licly avail­able in their LMS have so far only used this option to a very lim­ited extent. In addi­tion to the effort involved in mak­ing mate­ri­als pub­licly avail­able, another rea­son is cer­tainly that cul­tures of shar­ing still do not unite a large pro­por­tion of teach­ing staff. Often a quasi-mate­r­ial under­stand­ing of edu­ca­tion still seems to pre­vail, accord­ing to which access to mate­r­ial is made more dif­fi­cult so that no one can adorn them­selves with ‘other peo­ple’s feath­ers’. How­ever, the idea of Open Edu­ca­tional Resources does pro­vide for the pos­si­bil­ity of cit­ing authors and thus fol­low­ing famil­iar cita­tion pro­ce­dures. The great advan­tage of OER is rather that the cor­re­spond­ing mate­ri­als can be edited directly, adapted to your own needs and fur­ther devel­oped — ide­ally quite sim­ply, as they are pro­vided in open file for­mats, e.g. .docx in addi­tion to PDF.

Added value

Against this back­ground, we at twillo see two good rea­sons for pro­vid­ing didac­tic course tem­plates for teach­ers:

1. Inform teach­ers about teach­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and encour­age them to explore new or didac­ti­cally use­ful approaches
   With the didac­tic tem­plates we have cre­ated for tried and tested teach­ing and learn­ing con­cepts (includ­ing research-based learn­ing and prob­lem-based learn­ing), which con­tain a vari­ety of didac­tic tips on struc­ture, meth­ods and mate­ri­als, we first want to draw atten­tion to the pos­si­bil­ity of mak­ing course tem­plates cre­ated in the LMS pub­licly avail­able. Many teach­ers are prob­a­bly unaware of this option or have not looked into it in detail due to their con­stant high work­load.
   We share our tem­plates, which have been devel­oped to the best of our knowl­edge but are undoubt­edly not per­fect, in the spirit of a pos­i­tive error cul­ture and are con­vinced that they will ben­e­fit greatly from con­struc­tive feed­back and sug­ges­tions for opti­miza­tion. Per­haps they will go some way to encour­ag­ing unde­cided teach­ers who have not yet been able to bring them­selves to put mate­ri­als “out into the world” to do just that.
   
2. Mak­ing work eas­ier for lec­tur­ers
   Each LMS offers lec­tur­ers cer­tain mod­ules (con­tent ele­ments) to sup­port them in design­ing their courses. The actual design is the respon­si­bil­ity of the teach­ers them­selves. So far, there are no tem­plates for entire teach­ing-learn­ing con­cepts that con­tain sug­ges­tions for struc­tur­ing, meth­ods and tasks, for exam­ple, and thus offer a didac­ti­cally mean­ing­ful basic frame­work for course design, espe­cially for begin­ners, or at least pro­vide ori­en­ta­tion.
   Twillo wants to take a first step towards fill­ing this gap with the didac­tic tem­plates. In line with both the OER con­cept and spe­cific teaching/learning sit­u­a­tions, the didac­tic tem­plates can be indi­vid­u­ally adapted (e.g. the sequence and scope can be eas­ily changed and the tem­plate explic­itly pro­vides for the inser­tion of your own spe­cial­ist con­tent).

If not only indi­vid­ual mate­ri­als but entire courses are to be shared openly under license, sub­se­quent users are faced with spe­cific ques­tions about the assess­abil­ity and reusabil­ity of the courses: How can teach­ers inter­ested in the course get a pre­view of the course so that they can more accu­rately assess whether it is suit­able for their needs? Because the process of hav­ing to save the course and upload it to your own course in order to make an assess­ment is very cum­ber­some. Some Moo­dle and ILIAS instances make it pos­si­ble to make courses pub­lic for this pur­pose, among oth­ers. For the vast major­ity, we at twillo offer a prag­matic alter­na­tive with our tem­plates: We also pro­vide a view file of the essen­tial con­tent for each tem­plate (here using the exam­ple of the Research-based Learn­ing course tem­plate).

The idea of cross-uni­ver­sity reuse and fur­ther devel­op­ment of didac­tic tem­plates faces another tech­ni­cal prob­lem, namely the lack of com­pat­i­bil­ity of the file for­mats mbz (Moo­dle), SCORM (ILIAS) and XML (Stud.IP) gen­er­ated in the respec­tive LMS . Unfor­tu­nately, we can­not solve this prob­lem in prin­ci­ple, but at least we can solve it for the tem­plates we pro­vide by offer­ing each tem­plate for all three sys­tems (plus LiaScript).

Our conclusion

Didac­tic tem­plates com­bine LMS and OER: LMS are an indis­pens­able tool for the teach­ing con­text. Didac­tic tem­plates are didac­ti­cally struc­tured course tem­plates for learn­ing envi­ron­ments that depict didac­tic mod­els or teach­ing and learn­ing sce­nar­ios. OER are edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als that are avail­able under an open license and explic­itly allow adap­ta­tions under cer­tain con­di­tions (CC 0, CC BY).

Didac­tic tem­plates pub­lished as OER, i.e. not only acces­si­ble within the LMS, can help to relieve the bur­den on teach­ers, inspire them, bring them even more into the exchange and thus make teach­ing a lit­tle bet­ter.
The course tem­plates can also be used as sup­port when cre­at­ing your own OER. Newly cre­ated courses can of course be pub­lished on twillo as OER.

Feel like shar­ing? If you have any ques­tions about OER and the pro­vi­sion of LMS courses, you are wel­come to con­tact our sup­port team or come to our open con­sul­ta­tion hours, the twillo-thurs­day.