Enhancing IMS LD Units of Learning Comprehension

Abstract

IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) is a powerful and expressive educational modeling language, which is becoming a “de facto” encoding and interchange standard for activity-based courses. IMS LD expressivity includes functionalities such as the adaptation of the runtime behavior of the courses according to the performance and the specific needs of the learners. But these formally described courses, called Units of Learning (UoLs) in IMS LD, are difficult to understand and reuse by instructors, hindering IMS LD adoption. In this paper we describe how these shortcomings are resolved in e-LD, a flow-oriented authoring tool for IMS LD. In e-LD  preexisting designs encoded in IMS LD are automatically processed to produce a more understandable presentation with different views, such as a browse-able hyper-textual view or a graphical representation of the dependencies between UoL conditions and other components of the learning design. These views help to enhance UoLs’ comprehension by instructors.