Designing For Pedagogical Flexibility: Experiences From the CANDLE Project

Abstract: This paper examines the experience of a group of designers attempting to implement pedagogical flexibility in the design of the CANDLE system. It sketches out how flexibility is emerging as a new design criterion, but warns that the implementation of such flexibility is fraught with conflicts. After foregrounding the myth of pedagogical neutrality in system design, it examines CANDLE's early decision to build a system around a pan-pedagogical framework and the problems inherent in such an undertaking. In particular it reviews issues such as the operationalisation of pedagogical theory, the difficulties of disaggregation of learning resources into separate objects, the epistemological conflicts in the use of static ontologies for domain representation, metadata, meaning and communities of practice, access rights and granularity. It concludes by calling for educational systems designers to consider pedagogy in all its complexity in the process of design and development.