LdShake support for team-based learning design

Some educational innovation initiatives require practitioners to team up on the design of new learning activities. However, existing learning design tooling does not integrally support their tasks. Some tools enable authoring of designs, while other tools support sharing and commenting of learning design ideas, but none of them offers an integrated provision of technological features to support the work of design teams specifically. The requirements include team formation, the storage and retrieval of designs, and the promotion of interaction in the co-creation of designs. The LdShake platform has been conceived to enable sharing and co-editing of learning designs. This paper introduces LdShake's technological features and evaluates to what extent they support the aforementioned requirements. A first evaluation context is focused on learning design, while a second one is devoted to devising research ideas. The results obtained in the two contexts are complementary, pointing out distinct affordances and user behaviors (e.g., on browsing designs) that depend on the characteristics of each context, while also bringing to light the relevance of LdShake's social network related features. Overall, the design considerations proposed and the evaluation results obtained contribute toward an improved understanding of how to support networked teams. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.