Using learning design to deploy and administer engineering courses

The Learning Design specification was proposed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium to provide a generic and flexible language to capture the pedagogic structure of an online learning experience. The language is capable of capturing a wide range of pedagogic strategies facilitating course deployment, distribution and resource reuse. This paper presents the experience of capturing the structure of a regular course part of a degree in a higher educational institution using Learning Design. The course has a set of sessions and topics that run in parallel. Students work in small projects during a week while, in parallel, theory sessions are being held. Students exchange information among themselves and with the tutors about the projects through forums specifically created for it. Due to the highly parallel set of activities in the course, the organization of the course in acts was abandoned in favor of purely activity structure based paradigm.