Bridging the gap between practitioners and e-learning standards: A domain-specific modeling approach

Abstract

Developing a learning design using IMS Learning Design (LD) is difficult for average practitioners because a high overhead of pedagogical knowledge and technical knowledge is required. Through using peer assessment as an exemplary pedagogy, this paper presents a domain-specific modeling (DSM) approach to a new generation of LD authoring tools, for enabling practitioners to create learning designs. Adopting a DSM approach, on the one hand, pedagogic experts develop a pedagogy-specific modeling language, in which notations are directly chosen from the concepts and rules used to describe pedagogic approaches. On the other hand, technical experts develop transformation algorithms, which will map the models represented in the pedagogy-specific modeling language into machine-interpretable code represented in LD. This technical approach to a new generation of LD authoring tools has been illustrated through presenting the whole procedure of the development of a peer assessment authoring tool. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.