Octopus: A collaborative environment supporting the development of effective instructional design

Current technology does not meet the needs and expectations of instructional designers and teachers to collaborate on creating and using effective instructional designs to keep learners motivated and maximize the learning outcome. On the one hand, the IMS Learning Design standard is very complex for instructional designers and teachers to understand and use as a common language. On the other hand current tools, especially those close to the standard are not highly usable. This paper presents Octopus, an environment supporting collaboration between instructional designers and educators for the development of educational templates and scenarios that can be used and reused in different educational contexts. Octopus pays special attention in the users´ needs while it stays compatible with standards. Thus, usability studies have been performed from the earliest development steps, while a number of workshops have been organized with the participation of pedagogy experts and teachers. A significant number of educational templates and scenarios have been developed with Octopus as well, within ongoing EU projects.