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An important part of the role of any educator is that of planning learning sequences. Perhaps you are tasked with designing curriculum or more likely you are translating a mandatory curriculum into workable units of learning. The task is complex and there are multiple arrangements. The goal is to design units that connect students with learning in ways that are meaningful and relevant. A well-designed unit of learning fits seamlessly alongside other learning opportunities and the overall sequence of learning should match the learners developing expertise. As we plan units of learning we must consider a great variety of factors which impact the learning we design. Our knowledge of our students and where they are with their learning is crucial and a strong place to start. We also need to know what it is we are required to teach and have a grab bag of pedagogical moves that bring this content alive.

CompendiumLD is a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It is being developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out the design or learning sequence. Feedback from users suggests the process of visualising design makes their design ideas more explicit and highlights issues that they may not have noticed otherwise. It also provides a useful means of representing their designs so that they can be shared with others.

Identifying what our children need to learn is one of the most important processes within education. For the teacher this is the question they engage with as they design their teaching and learning units. By no means is this an easy task and the teacher must balance multiple factors to ensure that the programmes they design provide their students with the learning they require. Even the most effective sequence of lessons is of little value if what it sets out to teach has little importance in the lives our learners are likely to lead. 

In this post you will find a list of 49 FREE eBooks for instructional designers and eLearning professionals. If you have read any of the following books I will highly appreciate if you share your opinion with the eLearning community. If you know a free e-Learning book that is not included in the list please I will highly appreciate if you write a comment with a link to that book. It will be added at the top of the list!

In this post you will find a list of 49 FREE eBooks for instructional designers and eLearning professionals. If you have read any of the following books I will highly appreciate if you share your opinion with the eLearning community. If you know a free e-Learning book that is not included in the list please I will highly appreciate if you write a comment with a link to that book. It will be added at the top of the list!

"Version 2.0 Moodle 2.0, our biggest release ever, is coming together after two years of development. It contains a huge number of core changes to the platform, most of which are designed to give 3rd party developers more flexibility, scalability and safety. The timetable is designed to deliver Moodle 2.0 in time for the new school year in the northern hemisphere and currently looks like this: * March 2010: Moodle 2.0 Beta release * April, May, June 2010: intensive beta testing and bug fixing (freeze on new features) * 1 July 2010: Moodle 2.0 production release You can track our current progress in detail on the Moodle 2.0 Planning document. Please remember that this document is frequently updated and details can change a lot! Draft release notes at Moodle 2.0 release notes. Please add notable items while they are fresh in your mind. The notes will be edited before the final release. System requirements Since Moodle 2.0 is such a major release, we are allowing ourselves some increases in the requirements. * PHP 5.2.8 is now the minimum version supported. (We are aware that several important linux distros are still shipping earlier versions like 5.2.6, but we need at least version 5.2.x for the new File API, and there are bugs in 5.2.7 and earlier that we could not work around.) This allows developers to write cleaner code using the more recent features of PHP, and will also improve user experience. * Databases should be one of the following: o MySQL 5.0.25 or later (InnoDB storage engine highly recommended) o PostgreSQL 8.3 or later o Oracle 10.2 or later o MS SQL 2005 or later * When upgrading to Moodle 2.0, you must have Moodle 1.9 or later. if you are using an earlier version of Moodle (eg 1.8.x) then you need to upgrade to Moodle 1.9.x first. New Community features * Community hub - Moodle.com Makes it easy for teachers to find other courses to download as templates fo

OER Integrated set of resources for technology-enabled learning design across disciplines developed by Grainne Conole and Uni of leicester. The resources have all been tried and tested.

The CETL(NI) has developed a Hybrid Learning Model which can be used to describe learning activities as a series of understandable and universal set of learning events where the teachers and students experience and roles are clearly defined at each stage. The strength of this method is its transparency, use of plain English and its potential in breaking down effective complex learning activities into a generic, re-usable format so that good practice can be disseminated, reapplied and evaluated easily.

In the contemporary classroom, there is much greater consideration of what the learner does in partnership with their teacher so that they develop the capacity to learn. Classroom routines and structures are designed to engage the learner in a rich process of dialogical learning. 

The paper identifies a set of universal instructional design (UID) principles appropriate to distance education (DE) and tailored to the needs of instructional designers and instructors teaching online. These principles are then used to assess the accessibility level of a sample online course and the availability of options in its LMS platform (Moodle) to increase course accessibility.

Designing Learning for an LMS

Designing effective teaching and learning in La Trobe's Moodle LMS

Walk into any McDonald's, anywhere in the world, and you know where you are and what to expect. For the homesick traveller, the consistency of McDonald's' design aesthetic is comforting. You know how this is going to work, you understand what to do, and you know what you are likely to get. McDonald's requires minimal cognitive load on the customer's behalf.

This page makes it easy to find information and resources that are relevant to particular concepts, approaches and strategies. Each Collection is curated to serve a particular need and shares a set of resources pooled from The Learner's Way. In time this set of Collection will grow. In addition to articles from The Learner's Way you will be able to find resources designed to help you get started with the key concepts presented. The aim is to produce a set of resources which are readily accessible and of immediate benefit to classroom teachers and school leaders.