This paper has presented Collage, a collaborative LD editor that is intended to be used by teachers. It allows an easy editing of UoLs by reusing and customizing best practices, which are formulated as patterns (CLFPs), in structuring the flow of collaborative and non-collaborative learning activities. The ultimate goal of an LD editor such as Collage, is to create significant, pedagogically sound scenarios that can be interpreted by players. Collage covers an essential part of the participatory design process and therefore it may form part of the whole life-cycle of an LD. Collage can be integrated into a system that enables creation, modification, adaptation, running and testing. In our case, we are in the process of integrating Collage into Gridcole (Bote-Lorenzo et al., 2004), a system capable of interpreting LDs and setting up the technological environment needed to support all the (collaborative) learning activities included in the LD.

This paper introduces Collage, a high-level IMS-LD compliant authoring tool that is specialized for CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning). Nowadays CSCL is a key trend in e-learning since it highlights the importance of social interactions as an essential element of learning. CSCL is an interdisciplinary domain, which demands participatory design techniques that allow teachers to get directly involved in design activities. Developing CSCL designs using LD is a difficult task for teachers since LD is a complex technical specification and modelling collaborative characteristics can be tricky. Collage helps teachers in the process of creating their own potentially effective collaborative Learning Designs by reusing and customizing patterns, according to the requirements of a particular learning situation. These patterns, called Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFPs), represent best practices that are repetitively used by practitioners when structuring the flow of (collaborative) learning activities. An example of an LD that can be created using Collage is illustrated in the paper. Preliminary evaluation results show that teachers with experience in CL but without LD knowledge, can successfully design real collaborative learning experiences using Collage.