Learning Design Patterns: Exploring an inductive analysis approach

Learning design patterns assist the development of effective courses, because patterns capture successful solutions. Pedagogical patterns are commonly created by human cognitive processing in "writer's workshops". Inductive techniques could be used to detect or determine patterns in existing data, or learning designs. This assumes that the learning designs are available in a format that is machine interpretable. The IMS Learning Design specification enables the formal coding of learning designs. We explain that we expect patterns to occur in the method section of a learning design and in particular in acts. We explore several inductive techniques that could be applied to existing learning designs in order to detect and determine patterns and discuss how these could be applied to create new learning designs.