About the project
The first line of development focus on learning objects (LO) and the LMS market, inspired by the idea of a learning object economy advocating sharing and reusing learning objects. The second line of development focus on the competencies and skills for the 21st century learners, which we argue is strongly associated with the ideas of constructivism (in particular socio-constructivism) and deep learning. The two lines of development have a long history independent of each other, and have drawn in different if not opposite (un coordinated) directions. We believe the future learning management platforms (LMS) will benefit by taking advantage of integrated efforts for mutual benefit. We aim to accomplish this by suggesting a set of design principles that is grounded in learning theory, on one end, and emerging from empirical research on the other.
Background
The project has theoretical background is in the works of Dewey, Piaget and Vygotsky. These scholars have each contributed in different ways to constructivist learning, which have made a strong impact on research in CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning), but has not had a similar influence on commercial educational technology as the learning object community represent. On the other hand LMS systems have been more successful to in terms of realizing industry strength implementations in the educational sector with systems such as Canvas, Moodle and Its-Learning.
Financing
Total budget is 1 MNOK, Half if it is financed by RFF Hovedstadregion (Research Council of Norway) and the rest is self-financed. The work is divided into work packages, which includes a literature survey, and empirical case study, and recommendations to the LMS development house, Itslearning.
The time frame January to December 2018.
Cooperation
Its-learning is the most used learning management system (LMS) in Norwegian primary and secondary education. The platform contains rich data concerning planning, implementation, evaluation, follow-up and documentation of teaching and learning activities. It also provides a library of reusable learning objects of relevance for LA empirical studies.
