A Toolkit to Guide the Design of Effective Learning Activities
The DialogPLUS Toolkit is a web-based application that guides the design of learning activities. Developed to support the project’s geographers, it incorporates well-researched pedagogic taxonomies that are presented as drop-down lists with associated ‘help’ pages. Toolkit users are encouraged to consider and specify factors including learning and teaching approach, environment, aims and outcomes, assessment methods, learner and tutor roles and requisite skills as they design any number of tasks within a learning activity and select the tools and resources needed to undertake them. The output from the toolkit is a design template that can then be used to guide the instantiation and implementation of online learning activities. The designs are saved within the toolkit, forming a database of designs, which other toolkit users can view. This chapter will present the rationale for the toolkit and the detailed taxonomies. It will describe and illustrate the software design, development and implementation, including the approach to contextual ‘help’, provide examples of learning activity designs created using the toolkit; and present and discuss feedback from users.