What is CompendiumLD?
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 invovled 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. CompendiumLD provides a set of icons to represent the components of learning activities; these icons may be dragged and dropped, then connected to form a map representing a learning activity.
CompendiumLD comes with predefined sets of icons, some generic and some specific to learning design. The creation of a map is simple, users drag icons across and can start to build up relationships between these through connecting arrows:
- Users can add captions to each icon. Further detail and explanation about the icon, be it a student task, resource or learning objective for example, can be added in a separate pop-up window (shown as an asterisk next to the icon).
- Most common types of electronic files can be copied and pasted in to the design (word documents, Powerpoint presentations, images, pdfs etc.) enabling it to become the perfect repository for building your resource collection.
- A special reference node enables you to link directly to external websites.
- Icons can be meta-tagged using either a pre-defined set of key words or through user generated terms.
- Maps can be exported in a variety of ways from simple diagrammatic jpeg files through to inter-linked websites.
- We are currently developing other functions specifically for an educational and OU context. These include tool help, links to the Cloudworks learning design sharing site and the ability to assign time to each student task for workplanning.
CompendiumLD is a specialised version of Compendium, the mind mapping or argumentation software that provides a default set of icons for creating maps to visualise the connections between ideas.
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