At the heart of the Dialog Plus project is the notion of a 'nugget' or learning activity. A learning activity (LA) has seven main elements, four of which are requisite and three optional. The required elements areLearning outcomes: what the learners should know, or be able to do, after completing the LA; e.g. understand, demonstrate, design, produce, appraise.Attributes: including subject domain,, level of study, prerequisites, learning and teaching approach, environment/context, study skills, evaluation and time to complete the activity. Tasks: the order and organisation of mini-activities within the LA; e.g. read paper(s), discuss, access database(s), extract / manipulate data, answer questions, decide, write.Roles: the range of different functions that participants in the learning activity (both teachers and students) undertake; e.g. individual learner, group participant, presenter.The optional elelements are:Tools: facilitating applications; e.g. search engines, discussion boards, spreadsheets, media players.Resources: simple or complex learning objects; e.g. a webpage, a database, a video stream, an interactive map.Outputs: the products of the LA; e.g. contribution to a discussion, answers, text.In order to support teaching staff in designing and sharing learning activities, the authors have developed an online Learning Design Toolkit. Three main strands underpin our approach: · research, understand and apply what is going on in the learning design field, particularly evolving standards in the areas of sharing digital resources, interoperability, searching, re-purposing, permissions;· work closely with teaching colleagues to analyse their methods, when creating or re-purposing resources, and be guided by their requirements;· enshrine good practice within the toolkit, such that it will guide and support teachers in HE as they create, modify, and share teaching and learning resources.Taxonomies for tools and resources have been developed based on Laurillard's five principal media forms.2 Account has been taken of other work on pedagogical vocabularies, for example that of the UK's Learning & Teaching Portal Project.3 Toolkit attributes have been compared to learning object metadata standards including IMS4, SCORM5 and the UK's LOM6. A prototype toolkit has been developed and is currently being trialled by researchers and teaching staff. This paper outlines the development processes, describes the learning design toolkit and two use cases. The implications for European practitioners in higher education of current guidelines and standards for creating and using learning object metadata are outlined. Comparisons are made with other systems approaches to supporting teachers in higher education as they create, discover, re-purpose and share elearning resources. 1 JISC - the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, NSF - the USA's National Science Foundation2 Laurillard, D. (2002) Rethinking University Teaching, 2nd ed., London: RoutledgeFalmer3 See http://www.ltsn.ac.uk/genericcentre/index.asp?id=1 82624 See http://www.imsproject.org/5 See www.adlnet.org6 See http://www.cetis.ac.uk/profiles/uklomcore