Sharing Educational Knowledge and Best Practices in Edu-sharing

Currently we see a plethora of learning object repositories that address the need to share learning content with peers within and across educational institutions. We also observe a growing interest in standards and tool functionality to model didactic scenarios describing the social, spacial and temporal configuration of learning arrangements. These scenarios also specify physical resources, software tools as well as communication and cooperation services used thereby. For didactic scenarios, however, possibilities for sharing, reuse and adaptation are currently limited to communities relying on the official standard IMS Learning Design and tools that conform to it and to communities using the same learning activity management tool, e.g., LAMS. The particular contribution of our research is an extensible e-learning environment, edu-sharing, that supports sharing and reuse both of content and didactic scenarios across heterogeneous learning and authoring environments. We illustrate these capabilities through a case study in course design based on a method including the steps: finding, reusing, and adapting predefined didactic scenario templates. These templates representing mature learning arrangements found in literature or best practice experiences contributed by experts. The alignment of learning content with externalized knowledge about educational processes reduces the dominance of content in technology-enhanced learning and emphasizes didactic and social aspects of teaching and learning.