Zeyneb Tadjine

Lahcen Oubahssi

Claudine Piau-Toffolon

Sébastien Iksal

A process using ontology to automate the operationalization of pattern-based learning scenarios

Keywords: Operationalization, Patterns, Ontologies, Instructional design, LMS, Teaching situation

For most teachers-designers, operationalizing learning scenarios based on patterns just replicates traditional ways by adding course content and multimedia elements on learning management systems (LMS). We aim to go beyond this method by trying to engage the teachers-designers to design deployable learning scenarios. Using patterns for their design is proven to be an adequate solution to seek balance between the need of expressive instructional scenarios, and the technical constraints that occur while deploying these scenarios on learning management systems. Pattern's formal description is needed in order to translate the concepts of a pedagogical scenario, according to those embedded in the LMS. In this paper, we propose a process to structure, index, formalize, and finally adapt and operationalize the pattern-based learning scenarios. The presented process shows how the use of an ontology modeling learning scenario's concepts helps the automation of deploying the learning scenarios on an LMS. For that, this ontology has been extended with one representing a learning platform paradigm.

Introduction

Over the last decade we have seen the rise of learning design tools oriented learning platforms as an alternative to the classic way of designing learning scenarios. Although this initiative is very useful for both teachers and learners because it allows taking advantage of the features proposed by learning platforms, we notice that the final result of these tools is facing problems with the "full-integration" and compatibility with institutional systems [START_REF] Mor | The art and science of learning design: Editoral[END_REF]. We note also, that despite of the significant advances in research work about learning environments, the operationalization phase of learning scenarios still remains a challenge. Teachers-designers still need assistance during this phase. We take interest in our research work to the "full cycle" of designing, operationalizing and adapting educational situations. We consider the operationalization as the development of specific research procedures that will result in empirical observations representing the learning scenario's concepts technology enhanced learning environments. One issue that we address is related to the machine-readable representations of teaching practice for technology enhanced learning environments. The other, addressed to the human-readable representations for sharing design knowledge between teachers. We need to find the right balance between the expressiveness and usability of a representation form [START_REF] Agostinho | The future of learning design[END_REF]. Seeking answers for these issues, we studied the importance of the semantic technology and in particular the use of ontologies in developing learning design tools. Our focus was on how ontology-driven tools can support a learning design environment for teachers-designers to create designs under their own terms, and at the same time deployable under learning management systems terms, this, with a minimum of semantic loss. And since the facility of teacher's expressiveness is one of our major concerns, we studied how using a pattern-based learning design tool could help offering deployable learning scenarios. Their formalism has to respect a well defined structure in order to map easily the concepts embedded in the resulted learning scenario with the learning platform concepts. The semi-structured representation of scenarios will enable the capitalization and the reuse of teaching practices used by teachers. Most importantly, our hypothesis is that this representation allows browsing the patterns for relevant information retrieval and the deployment of this information. The final goal is to ensure an automatic deployment of the pattern-based learning scenarios on learning management systems such as Moodle [START_REF] Rice | Moodle 2.0 E-Learning Course Development[END_REF] and Sakai [START_REF] Sakai | [END_REF]. We propose a five steps process, as presented in section 4. The structuring and indexing phases provide a conceptual representation of theory and practice about learning scenarios, as well as about learning environments, and make it available for use, through a pattern-based tool for designing scenarios by teachersdesigners as a Formalizing phase. This, ensures to benefit from the learning design vocabulary by being able to construct designs quickly, and co-construct knowledge. During the adaptation and operationalization phases, we suggest ways of combining conventional teaching and learning methods with the variety of features and tools embedded in learning management systems now available. We have studied as a first field of experimentation Moodle platform. We considered the Moodle 2.4 Meta modal proposed in [START_REF] Mawas | A meta-model based approach for identifying and formalizing LMS instructional design languages[END_REF] which gathers the entire pedagogical paradigm proposed in this environment.

The remaining of this paper proceeds as follows: section 2 presents the related research works on instructional design for the operationalization of pedagogical scenarios. We focus on ontology based approaches for indexing and conserving the semantics of pedagogical objects and pattern based approaches to express and formalize scenarios; section 3 overviews a case study we conducted to capture needs and constraints about operationalizing pattern-based learning scenarios; section 4 describes our process based on patterns and ontologies to help achieving the automatic operationalization of learning scenarios.

Operationalization of learning situations

The field of instructional design and technology encompasses the analysis, the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of instructional processes and resources intended to improve learning [START_REF] Andrews | A comparative analysis of models of instructional design[END_REF]. Each step is highly affected by the pre-vious ones. We are interested in the operationalization of learning scenarios, which converges to the deployment of the designed learning scenarios, intended, or not, for a specific learning environment. In this section, and based on the correlation between designing scenarios and their deployment, we list several approaches expressing learning design knowledge and we emphasize their advantages and weakness in order to get a clearer picture the most suitable and adaptable one to automate operationalizing pattern-based learning scenarios. Tools are emerging to support a variety of approaches to design learning. In particular, design oriented learning platforms, where teachers-designers create deployable learning scenarios. But this task appears to be complex for one who isn't very well familiarized with learning platforms technologies and computer environments. That's why many research works addressed these learning design issues, but few are those who take into account the aspect of operationalization. As entitled in this paper, we are working specifically on pattern-based designs, and we note that most of these learning design approaches and support tools do not explicitly integrate them in technological learning environment [START_REF] Chimalakonda | A Patterns-Based Approach for Modeling Instructional Design and TEL Systems[END_REF]. And when they do, as in Collage [START_REF] Villasclaras-Fernández | Web Collage: an implementation of support for assessment design in CSCL macroscripts[END_REF] case, the intervention of a platform expert is indispensable. This would be justified by the fastidiousness of this step. As a matter of fact, many difficulties and constraints are related to learning platforms, that range from the basic instructional language and rules to the implicit and complex structures related to each particular platform. Thus, these problems will create a semantic gap when considering learning scenarios concepts and platforms features. For example, designing tools based on modeling languages (EML) [START_REF] Koper | Modelling Units of Study from a pedagogical perspective: The pedagogical metamodel behind EML[END_REF], more specifically the educational standard languages [START_REF] Martel | Modeling collaborative learning activities on e-learning platforms[END_REF] [10] such as CADMOS [START_REF] Katsamani | Designing a Moodle course with the CADMOS learning design tool[END_REF] consider an XML notation, which is judged complex and tends to change the teachers-designers view of their scenarios. Also, since platforms do not follow any educational standards, deploying a standardized scenario would not be easy for a teacher to do. It will require the expertise of a pedagogical engineer. By another way, when those standardized designing tools take the operationalization step into account, it is always about one targeted learning environment (eg: CADMOS generates scripts to only deploy scenarios on Moodle).

As a solution to the lack of expressivity of Educational Modeling Languages, we chose a structured and formalized pattern approach for learning designs. Patterns provide a mean to abstract and represent good practices. They are used to capture expert knowledge of the teaching practice. A pattern is pictured as a three-part structure, specifying a problem and a solution addressing this problem according to a specific context [START_REF] Alexander | A pattern language, town, buildings, constructions[END_REF]. Defined links between patterns (association, composition, etc.) are considered as a pattern language. [START_REF] Clayer | Assistance for Learning Design Community-A Context-awareness and Pattern-based Approach[END_REF] proposed a pattern structure and formalization in order to improve the instructional design process, taking advantage of what patterns offer in terms of structure and ease of expression but they do not address their integration into technology enhanced learning (TEL) systems.

Educational language representation was used to help to structure the proposed patterns [START_REF] Buendía-García | Using patterns to design technologyenhanced learning scenarios[END_REF]. We find many projects in the learning design with patterns area, as for example WebCollage [START_REF] Villasclaras-Fernández | Web Collage: an implementation of support for assessment design in CSCL macroscripts[END_REF], a designing tool based on pedagogical patterns. But within this approach, the implementation step still requires a platform expert assistance. [START_REF] Clayer | Assistance for Learning Design Community-A Context-awareness and Pattern-based Approach[END_REF] Suggests an engineering design process framework and an editing tool based on pat-terns, however, the operationalization aspect of the patterns is not addressed. Finally, GLUE!-PS is a tool dealing with deploying learning designs from multiple learning design language/authoring tool to multiple learning environments, yet, the design languages are based on IMS LD, which is too complex for the teachers [START_REF] Prieto | GLUE!-PS: a multi-language architecture and data model to deploy TEL designs to multiple learning environments[END_REF].

We have noticed that most of the proposed design languages and tools do not preserve the semantic meaning of teachers' intention while transposing it on a learning system. There will be a lack of information, and as consequence a need for adapting the initial learning scenario. Moreover, we believe that the use of ontologies for both designing as well as operationalizing scenarios can solve this problem. Ontologies allow having one same semantic base which will retain the essence of the scenario during the transition between learning design and deployment phases. In educational fields, ontologies have played an important role as knowledge representation and sharing mechanism. We find ontologies based on IMS LD language [START_REF] Ims-Ld | IMS Learning Design[END_REF], as well as ontologies describing the learning scenario [START_REF] Paquette | A Competency-Based Ontology for Learning Design Repositories[END_REF] and also ontologies to describe common modules of learning platforms [START_REF] Montenegro | Modeling and comparison study of modules in open source lms platforms with cmapstool[END_REF]. We noticed that the main advantages of these ontologies take place during the learning design phase. But we highly believe that it would simplify the implementation phase and help us to automate the deployment of patterns based scenarios.

We close this section by noting that the main concern of this work is to study the mechanisms supporting instructional design and scenario's deployment activity by teachers-designers. We are adopting a co-participative and iterative approach with teachers-researchers. The approach is called "Design Based Research" [19], a methodology suitable to both research and design of technology-enhanced learning environments (TELEs). Especially those design experiments involve both scientific and educational values, through scientific processes of discovery, exploration, confirmation, and transmission that create strong links among researching, designing, and engineering. By this approach, we try to reduce the gap between what a technology enhanced learning environment is and how it is defined theoretically (comparing what it is and how it is used in practice).

Deploying a pattern-based learning scenario: Moodle case study

As pattern-based design approaches have not been studied from the operationalization point of view, we seek through our study to capture the insights of deploying their resulted learning scenarios. We aim at defining a series of constraints to make explicit the structure to follow that would support the automatic operationalization of a pattern-based learning scenario. We also aim to prove the feasibility of automatically import a teacher's point of view of a learning scenario on a computer environmentwith its embedded language-without losing information.

The research question tackled with this study is: which approaches models and / or techniques to consider for transforming the pattern-based scenarios into implementable models on different learning platforms?

If we look into the question, it is obvious that we need to explore both the human and the machine sides of a learning scenario. As in figure Fig. 1, we defined two starting points: For the need of our study we extracted, during this first step, a list of learning concepts identified in the textual version of our scenario (ex. course plan, role, chapter, pedagogical objective, etc.). We intend to compare this list of concepts with the ones present on the deployed version of the scenario. For this comparison (explained farther in this section), we considered the scenario about the algorithmic course deployed manually on Moodle, which is our platform for experimentation). Then, we modeled this textual version of the teacher's intention using a pattern-based design tool to study the operationalization of the pattern-based design approaches [START_REF] Clayer | Assistance for Learning Design Community-A Context-awareness and Pattern-based Approach[END_REF]. The environment in which the activities were conceived allows teachers to visually build up learning scenarios (Fig3, Fig. 4). As proposed by the tool, the design is not specifically intended to be implemented on a learning platform. The teacher might (or not) desire to create a platform oriented scenario, but the tool only allows him to design it based on Course: Introduction to algorithms and programming.. We notice that for a textual version of the scenario, several pattern formalizations (without any loss of the learning concepts identified earlier) are possible to be designed. Since it is a pattern based tool, it guarantees the freedom of the teacher's expressiveness. We illustrated the two (but not the only) versions of our learning scenario (Fig3, Fig. 4).

After the formalization step, come the observations from an operationalization point of view. We consider the study of Moodle XML files of our scenario (already operationalized manually). The idea behind this step is to identify the different needs and constraints around the deployment of learning scenarios on TEL environments. Following the same logic as in the earlier steps, we identified the learning scenario's concepts. Once again, the concepts list remained unchanged (ex. Course plan, role, chapter, pedagogical objective, etc.). This proves us the possibility to reproduce the same human point of view of a learning situation, designed using patterns, on a computer environment. Though, going the other way round (taking into account the deployed scenario and compare its concepts with the ones of the formalized scenario), we have noticed a lack of a set of information needed for the operationalization. We take for example the "Activities completion conditions" which was implemented on the platform but was absent in the formal version of the scenario, teachers didn't pay attention to add the information to their design, even though they are necessary to deploy their scenario.

Those first steps results lead us to conclude that the use of ontologies and metamodeling when defining patterns for scenarios would reduce the semantic gap due to the transformation steps from the teacher's pedagogical intention to the platform.

The third and final step was to confront the XML file obtained from Moodle scenario (after transforming the backup file according to Moodle meta-model [START_REF] Mawas | A meta-model based approach for identifying and formalizing LMS instructional design languages[END_REF] ( Fig 5 [START_REF] Agostinho | The future of learning design[END_REF]) with the XML file generated from the pattern-based editing tool ( Fig 5 ( 1)) (we kept two versions of the learning scenario formalization).

Through this confrontation, we noticed that: a pattern component corresponds, sometimes, to more than one educational concept. The identification is not" unique". We take as an example the Human resource concept "Student", it is defined in two different places: as a Human resource Pattern (and as the "participant" pattern component of the design pattern "Learning situation" (Fig 5). Also, the same pedagogical concepts are identified in different locations for each formalized version (according to the teacher's point of view, if we imagine a new version 3 of the scenario it may be represented in a complete different way). This makes it difficult to automatically implement the scenario on a computer environment. As a conclusion, we say that a pattern-based formalization, considering its semi structured data, may allow teachersdesigners expressing their pedagogical needs without extensive loss of semantic information while representing their pedagogical intention with a pattern-based editing tool. On the other side, this open way of expressivity raises some difficulties for automating the learning scenario operationalization phase. In fact, learning platforms have their own pedagogical structure and language. So, the mapping of each element of the scenario with the relevant concepts in the platform is not obvious. We need to guide the teacher-designer toward a learning design approach that considers the operational needs and constraints, without forcing them to use any specific platform formalism. Through this study, the previously cited features of a design based on patterns are worth considering for a platform oriented design. The goal is to successfully maintain the semantics of learning scenarios while transforming its pedagogical concepts into learning platforms features. But, we should first point our research on how could we provide to the teacher-designer the predefined components or "patterns", that would be used to gradually build a learning scenario ready to be directly implemented on any learning platform. We must define formalism for these patterns, so that the learning design process delivers a structure helping the automatic operationalization without limiting the degree of expressivity and reuse.

Designing learning scenarios based on patterns is not enough to achieve our automation goal, it is essential for us to combine patterns use with an indexing service. It would help to translate and implement each of the scenario's educational concepts in distinct learning platforms. In this direction, ontologies are also a very important part of this work, considering the knowledge representation and the sharing mechanisms they offer. We model and browse the learning vocabulary and language embedded in our experimental learning platform as well as in learning scenarios. Ontologies allow making a description of learning scenario's context, taking into account the level of granularity used in it (teaching program, course, learning unit, etc.).

(1)

(2)

Developing Pattern-based learning designs: A process toward an automatic operationalization

In this section we describe a five step process as a mean to support learning designers to develop adequate learning designs ready to be directly implemented on a computer environment. We believe that we should offer to teachers a merging of expressivity, but it should be structured enough to make scenarios machine-readable representations of a teaching practice. It is a process where knowledge, competencies, learning activities, resources and delivery modes are pattern-based designed; they are then constructed explicitly in a framework based on our proposed learning scenario ontology. It helps to integrate the teacher's design into an e-learning environment that consists of a number of features and components interacting with learning design (e.g. tests, forums, chats, etc.). Our motto is that information about the computer environment should be added automatically in the learning design. This has the advantage that teachers-designers are not distracted from the problem of designing a learning scenario itself by all the constraints and technical requirements that the learning platforms involve. Let's begin with a general overview of the process: The first two steps structuring (1) and indexing (2) allow a mapping of the educational concepts (coming from the teaching practices and needs of designers) and the learning platforms concepts and features. Formalizing (3), this consists on developing pattern-based scenarios by teachers-designers. Then, we have the step to automate the implementation of scenarios [START_REF] Mawas | A meta-model based approach for identifying and formalizing LMS instructional design languages[END_REF]. Before that, an adaptation step ( 4) is conducted to reduce the gap between the pedagogical language embedded in the platforms and the one used by teacher-designers. By the following we give more details about each step:

Structuring

The idea behind this step is to use generic description of a learning scenario as a universal basis to teacher's design. In other words, we have seen in section 3, the need of an ontology modeling the concept of learning scenario. We can observe that the patterns-structured learning design scenarios, for a Moodle application, cause some difficulties while deploying on a computer environment. Some pedagogical concepts, such as "Activity completion condition" or "Activities order" could be missed or ignored. This lack of information prevents the automatic implementation of the scenarios. Based on this observation we propose to identify the different concepts of a learning scenario. The aim is to formalize these concepts in educational patterns (part 4.3). The identification is based on a research work about ontologies and educational standards (see in particular work presented by [START_REF] Abedmouleh | An Analysis Process for Identifying and Formalizing LMS Instructional Language[END_REF] [20] [START_REF]LOM specification, Learning Object Metadata[END_REF]). To build our namespace, we relied on the definition of a learning scenario and its dimensions to define our basic classes of concepts [START_REF] Weibel | Dublin core metadata for resource discovery[END_REF]. We consider different levels of granularity for a learning scenario: a structure unit, an instructional sequence and even an elementary activity (see Fig 6). We used Dublin Core Standard [START_REF]LOM specification, Learning Object Metadata[END_REF], LOM 1 and MLR 2 to meet the universal description of the learning vocabulary. We also defined additionnal terms and concepts extracted from our study about learning scenarios [START_REF] Abedmouleh | An Analysis Process for Identifying and Formalizing LMS Instructional Language[END_REF] [START_REF] Buendía-García | Using patterns to design technologyenhanced learning scenarios[END_REF]. For that, we used OWL3 /RDF4 description as shown in Table 1. Once the vocabulary for the scenario is built, we proceeded for the classification phase. In order to offer pedagogically correct, significantly related and well structured patterns, we relied on Bloom's taxonomy to classify the educational knowledge and the different types of learning scenarios and activities [START_REF] Anderson | A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives: Complete edition[END_REF].

Fig. 6. A sample of our proposed ontology

This classification will help the indexing work (presented next), because the structure of the learning scenario has to satisfy the requirements of its implementation. We are talking about how to ease the detection and extraction of the relevant pedagogical information in order to map it to the most suitable platform feature, having a minimal semantic gap. Semantic relations should be defined between the different levels (Hierarchy, Typology, Compositions, Use etc.). For that we use the "ObjectProperties in OWL description", also, some of the Dublin Core properties that meet our need. We note that as a result of our observations while confronting the two representations of a learning scenario from a platform independent design point of view, and a from a platform deployment one, we defined some constraints that we found obvious to us (Fig. 6). These constraints could be completed and ameliorated with the study of multiple versions of the same scenario on different learning environments.

Indexing

Learning platforms offer features and components usually more suitable for use in a particular pedagogical situation. In this phase of the process, we help teachers to directly find the right equivalent of their design concepts. The idea is the alignment of our proposed ontology concepts with ones on each learning platform. It is a mapping between both learning platforms and learning scenarios pedagogical language. For that, we needed to create an ontology for the Moodle platform as a starting point, we intend to study more learning environment to enrich our indexation. The learning platform ontology is built based on its meta-model [START_REF] Mawas | A meta-model based approach for identifying and formalizing LMS instructional design languages[END_REF], it was identified through the process of identification and formalization the LMS instructional design language, and we also used the XSD-OWL transformation rules. Through our confrontation work (section 3) between a pattern-based learning scenario and its operationalized version, we identified a component of the learning scenario that has been translated into several features on the learning platform (ex. "Student"). Consequently, we need this indexation as a necessary intermediate phase between the design and the operationalization of a learning scenario. We initially use our ontological description about the learning scenario concepts presented previously (4.1).

Fig. 7. Indexation example

We proceed on matching every concept, every semantic relation, and every constraint of the learning platform semantic description on our learning scenario ontology. This indexation will create an extension to our ontology (as shown in Fig 7, which is an example of the indexation of a part of Moodle Activities). It is part of the originality of our proposal. Consequently we had a semantic description of Moodle metamodel, reduced to its embedded pedagogical language. The ontology extension allows adapting any set of patterns designed by the teacher-designer, to a directly implemented scenario on any learning platform.

Formalizing

We aim at providing design ideas in a structured way, so that relations between design components are easy to create by teachers and easy to understand by computers. This formalization is the essence of a graphical meta-language for learning design that has an explicit translation to the learning platform pedagogical language using the previously described indexing service. This works in both directions: from visual notation to OWL-XML and from OWL-XML to visual notation. The formalism is mainly inspired by the design patterns that have been adopted in e-learning context [START_REF] Pernin | Dispositifs d'apprentissage instrumentés par les technologies : vers une ingénierie centrée sur les scénarios[END_REF] and the different formalisms used to describe the patterns [START_REF] Goodyear | Patterns and pattern languages in educational design. Handbook of research on learning design and learning objects: Issues, applications and technologies[END_REF]. The patterns are used to capture best practices and learning design knowledge that relates to ontologies presented in section 4.1 and 4.2.

This step was proved essential taking into consideration the conclusions we made while modeling our scenarios with the pattern-based editing tool (Part 3). We noticed that it is more likely an open tool for learning design that allows a free expression leading to some difficulties for detecting a specific useful concept. For example, the course duration could be set differently from one version of a scenario to another. Another example as mentioned in part 3, the design of a Role (Student-teacher) isn't quite defined in a unique way, different pattern's components allowed the introduction of such information. Therefore, and in order to get over the automatic operationalization problems, the composition of a pattern, should not compromise the detection of the relevant information, it should be well formalized while offering for teachers some freedom to design their scenarios. To be able to locate any information in a pattern is the key to an automatic operationalization, also, ensured by the use of an ontology allowing combining the pedagogical language concepts of a teacherdesigner and the learning platform concepts (cf section 4.5).

The following illustration Fig. 8 introduces a class diagram to define a learning design pattern classification that we propose. It is inspired from P-sigma's unified formalism [START_REF] Goodyear | Patterns and pattern languages in educational design. Handbook of research on learning design and learning objects: Issues, applications and technologies[END_REF]. Each Pattern is a set of three components: Header, Core and Resource. Header is the part helping to select patterns; it contains six items as detailed in table 3. Core is the part where the teachers-designers give the solution in terms of modeling activities dealing with their pedagogical intentions. Finally, the Resource part is where the teachers-designers specify the learning object and tools to use. We note that it is a non-obligatory part in the design because sometimes, the need is only to design a flow of activities without any further specification, as in the case of designing a structuration unit, it is only a general definition of a set of objectives and their timeline. In addition to the p-sigma's structure, each of our patterns will be formalized as one of the learning scenario's levels of granularity mentioned in the literature; a learning scenario (LS) can be classified according to different criteria [START_REF] Weibel | Dublin core metadata for resource discovery[END_REF]: based on the granularity of the targeted learning situation. We identified three main categories of patterns when examining the main concepts of a scenario: "Structuation unit pattern", "Activity sequence" pattern and "Elementary activity" pattern, we define each type of a learning pattern (Table 2)

Pattern Definition Structuration unit

It corresponds to a learning situation in which a set of instructional sequences are gathered to constitute a logical unit about a given learning theme and dedicated to a specific audience.

Sequence of activities

It corresponds to a learning situation where several activities or sequences are organized in order to reach a learning goal clearly defined in terms of knowledge and competencies. This organization must be able to express conditions of sequentiality, optionality and parallelism. It must also describe the associated data flow process.

Elementary activity

It corresponds to a situation where one or several actors (learner, teacher, tutor, etc.) interact within a defined environment for a generally short and contiguous determined duration. An elementary activity may pursue a precise learning goal or more simply contribute to the goal associated with the sequence in which it will be integrated. The table below describes the different items of a learning pattern; each one of the attributes is proposed after studying the need of balancing between our operationalization's constraints and theories around learning activities and pedagogical experiences (cf section 3). It is very important to note that by filling each of these items, the teacher-designer will create non ambiguous expressions of scenarios, abstract or concrete, that helps their reuse and more importantly, their deployment on a learning platform. We chose each item of the proposed patterns' rubrics for their pedagogical contributions. It would be easy for a teacher-designer to define his scenario using his own ideas while translating them on the pattern's components intuitively. We take as an example the "Classification", each designer should be aware of the pedagogical classification of his intended activity: is it a knowledge activity? An evaluation? etc. So, it should not be hard for him to intuitively express his idea of a scenario using our proposed rubrics. As a second illustration, we consider the ''context", it is dedicated to explain the pre-conditions, the prerequisites and the elements necessary for the use of the learning scenario based on the pattern, and as consequence we could directly detect the "completion conditions" or "grades constraints" for a deployed learning scenario.

Item

Adaptation and operationalizing the pattern-based learning scenario

This part of the process is described briefly. These two last steps of our process reflect the adjustments to apply on the learning scenario aiming to allow its automatic operationalization. The starting point is the pattern-based learning scenario Fig 9 ; it should be formalized according to our proposed structure of a deployable patternbased scenario. Depending on the target LMS, we use the module of learning scenario importation [START_REF] Conte | A tool and a formalism to design and apply patterns[END_REF] to create an instantiation of the indexed concepts (as presented in section 4.3), providing an XML file in accordance with the meta-model of the learning platform. The XSLT transformations are applied to cover the missing information and properties if necessary. This importation is automatic and does not require any intervention of the learning platform expert. The teacher only has to express his/her intention and pedagogical need in a semi-open structured language.

Conceptual and Semantic Level.

This first level of representation stands with the "Computationally Independent" viewpoint, and enables us to have an instructional design knowledge representation as closer as it could be to the language used by a human teacher as well as the language embedded in a learning management system. this layer is about the "Learning scenario" modeled in an ontology inspired. This ontology should reflect the different teaching strategies and the different levels of granularity in a learning scenario (a course, a learning unit etc.).

Conceptual view

Conceptual and semantic level

Learning design level

Specific view

Keeping in mind our main objective to automate the operationalization process of learning scenarios, this ontology should include in its definition of concepts, the features provided by the various LMS to consider. This extension is an indexation of the instructional language of a learning platform. Building this semantic level ensures a common vocabulary for all teachers-designers and facilitates the interoperability between different LMS.

Learning / Instructional Design Level.

The previously presented process's phases "structuring" and ''formalizing" provide a representation of the pattern-based scenario. This result is what makes the content of the instructionl design level. Each element of instructional design level is connected to one or more nodes from the semantic representation (level 1). The elements are linked through "Instructional Relations" that establish the function and identify the various features to use on the learning platform while deploying the scenario.

Content and Resources Level.

This content layer consists of different learning objects (documents and material resources) used in different contexts such as: course notes, exam's forms, the use of software and any mean of communication etc. A classification of these objects is considered [START_REF] Churchill | Towards a useful classification of learning objects[END_REF] (presentation, practice, simulation, conceptual models, contextual information and representation objects). This level is strongly related to levels 2 and 3, it allows to instantiate the objects on learning platforms depending on the choice of use of the teacher-designer (as a support resource, mediation, building knowledge or as course application ).

Conclusion

In this paper, we propose to offer a mean to guide the automatic operationalization of pattern-based learning scenarios. Especially, that it is based on a process that doesn't require from a teacher-designer to master the complicated instructional language of the learning platform. To validate whether this process allow us to meet our needs, a series of further work is planned. The structured ontology and the indexation of learning platforms concepts within this ontology (as proposed in section 4.1 and 4.2) is considered as a data layer representation of our tool's architecture. A service of indexing and adaptation will be developed using Jena 5 library, which is a free and open source Java framework for building Semantic Web and Linked Data applications. Those services are the business back-end treatment of the teacher's Visual Design based on the proposed patterns. It will help the creation of a machine readable scenario, well adaptable to a target platform and ready to be operationalized without any extra effort from the teacher. We relied on a case study that helped us to highlight the problems facing the operationalization of learning scenarios based on patterns. We proved the need to use a semantic description of a learning scenario to minimize the gap between a human instructional language and a machine readable one. Moodle platform was our first application environment; we intend to extend our indexing phase by studying other learning platforms to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposition.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Case study and methodology

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Learning scenario extract

  Strategy: Discover, Remember, Apply, Self assessment. Objectif: At the end of the course the students should be able to a problem into sub-problems, also, how to define simple data s Organization: A 5 chapters course: 5 Courses: 1H / 10 Practical sessio sessions : 3H00. Course Plan: Course 1: Basic elements / Course 2: Basic instructions/ Course 3: T cedures and methods / Course 5 : Files Skills: Technical Design of an IT solution / Development of an IT solution / Test va Cours 1 objectives: To acquire the basic elements to build an algorithm. Chapters structure: Chapter Sub-Chapter 1 Sub-Chapter 2 Discover Remember Self assessmen Apply generic patterns. This was our key to extract the problems that would face this kind of design when it comes to its deployment.

Fig. 3 .Fig. 4 .

 34 Fig. 3. Learning scenario Version1

Fig. 5 .

 5 Fig. 5. XML scenario from the patttern based editor (1) and the platform (2)

Fig. 8 .

 8 Fig. 8. Learning design pattern's formalism

Fig. 9 .Fig. 10 .

 910 Fig. 9. Adaptation and operationalizing of a learning scenario

  t e r n -b a s e d l e a r n i n g s c e n ar i o s -P a t t e r ns t r u c t u r e s -C o u r s e s n o t e s : t e x t , p p t e t c . -R e v i e w f o r m s -E x t e r n a l S o f tw a r e -C o m m u n i c at i o n t o o l s -E t c .

Table 1 .

 1 A sample of domain vocabulary and its properties.

	Concept	Type pro-	Object proper-	Concept
		perties	ties
		dct:description	owl:UnionOf	elementary activity
		dct:identifier		Activity sequence
				Structuration unit
			owl: isVersionOf	Learning Scenario
	Learning Sce-nario		dct: Has	Context
			dct:HasPart	Learning Scenario
			dct: source	Pattern
			dct: creator	Teacher
				Designer
	Structuration	dct:description	dct :hasPart	Activity sequence
	unit	dct:identifier
	Activity se-	dct:description	owl: UnionOf	elementary activity
	quence	dct:identifier
	elementary ac-	dct:description	dct: Requires	Agent
	tivity:	dct:identifier	dct: Requires	Resources
		dct:Value	dct: Requires	Activity Type
			dct: Requires	Constraints
	Resources	dct:description	dct: Type	Resource_Type
		dct:identifier
		dct:format
		dct:description	dct:Mediator	Teacher
	DCMI: Agent	dct:identifier		Student
			dct:Type	Group
				Individual

Table 2 .

 2 Learning design Patterns categories.

Table 3 .

 3 Learning design Patterns components.

http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Learning_Object_Metadata_Standard

https://elearningstandards.wordpress.com/tag/mlr/

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/OWL

http://www.w3.org/RDF

https://jena.apache.org/


Jean-Pierre Clayer
email: jean-pierre.clayer@univ-lemans.fr

Claudine Piau-Toffolon
email: claudine.piau-toffolon@univ-lemans.fr

Christophe Choquet
email: christophe.choquet@univ-lemans.fr

Assistance for Learning Design Community

Keywords: Learning Design, Design process, Assistance, Context-Awareness, Patterns, Pedagogical Design Scheme

Designing learning is a complex task. Researchers and teachers have proposed many methodological issues to deal with it. Despite valuable technological advantages of machine-readable outcomes, most of the time these proposals are too complex to use, limiting the expressiveness, the sharing and reuse of learning scenario by the teachers' community. Learning design processes support and guidance are often missing or insufficiently adaptable to the design context. Based on the needs of an association dealing with professional integration in charge with back-to-work programs named PARTAGE, we defined a design approach based on patterns and an editing tool to support the learning design activities to help the sharing of pedagogical scenarios inside the teachers' community of PARTAGE. In this work, we focus our attention on the assistance abilities of the editing tool, depending of its design context awareness. We realize a pilot study on this approach according to a participatory design approach with trainers of the association and the research team in charge with the study.

INTRODUCTION

According to Laurillard, teaching may be considered as a design science (Laurillard, 2012, p1). Learning Design is a complex task [START_REF] Rohse | Design Patterns for Complex learning[END_REF]. The learning design research field produced a set of design process, methods and associated tools such as Instructional design models, the MISA Instructional Engineering Method [START_REF] Paquette | Instructional engineering for learning objects repositories networks[END_REF], learning design specifications like PALO, LDL or the IMS-LD learner activity-driven approach [START_REF] Koper | Representing the Learning Design of Units of Learning[END_REF].

Researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) get increasing interest within approaches based on patterns. Patterns are potentially valuable tools for designing complex learning management systems. Design approaches based on patterns introduce a way to negotiate the new emergent roles of teachers and learners by, for instance, allowing the learner to assume a designer role, based on the instantiation (contextualization) of a pattern on a given learning situation (Rohse and Anserson, 2006). By example, learners or teachers may assume a designer role criticizing or refining a pattern solution as the context evolves on a learning situation. These approaches are immediately relevant to teachers as they present means by which the teaching community can participate in design. The knowledge and the know-how developed by the teacher is externalized, embodied in patterns sharable in a community that can critique and build its knowledge (Laurillard, 2012, p8). COLLAGE, a collaborative learning flow pattern (CLFP) editor (Hernandez Leo & al, 2006) proposes a visual pattern based design approach implementing learning scenarios in RELOAD. This approach is based on the IMS LD specification which enables the modeling of learning processes. The MDEduc project proposes a Pedagogical Patterns Editor for the design of learning scenario. This is a text editor using the formalism and the syntax of patterns. ScenEdit and the ISIS model support also a pattern based approach to design learning scenarios. Teachers can share and reuse practices with patterns as far as they could be expressed with a pedagogical oriented vocabulary and syntax.

Nevertheless, these approaches propose teachers to identify the best solution (pattern) among existing ones for their pedagogical needs according to a given pedagogical model, reflecting a specific pedagogical approach. We've named such models pedagogical design schemes (PDS).

Nevertheless, these approaches have some limitations. One of them is the lack of design assistance mechanisms [START_REF] Villiot-Leclercq | Modèle de soutien pour l'élaboration et la réutilisation de scénarios pédagogiques[END_REF]. According to [START_REF] Dufresne | Vers un modèle générique d'assistance aux acteurs du téléapprentissage[END_REF], two assistance levels could be defined : the first level is to provide users with an editing tool for designing a pedagogical scenario, the second one is to offer a support for design activity with such an editor. In a design context where instantiating patterns are emphasized, we introduce a third level of assistance, for helping the users to reuse existing patterns and to share new ones.

Thus, our main issue is to define a design approach based on the instantiation of shared patterns, by using an editing tool where the design activity benefits from contextualized assistance which takes into account user own design approach identified as pedagogical design scheme.

Our technical approach is in the scoop of Domain Specific Modeling. It allows designers (assisted by modeling experts if needed) to define their own Educational Modeling Language by specifying a domain-specific language and to use it for building their scenarios [START_REF] El Kechaï | Understanding the Collective Design Process by Analyzing Intermediary Objects[END_REF]. This approach enables the design of computational models (i.e. models interpretable by a computer) which could be enacted by compliant systems.

The work we relate here was primarily based on the needs expressed by PARTAGE, an association dealing with professional integration in charge with back-to-work programs. Initially, the persons in charge of this association wanted to produce computerized pedagogical materials in order to facilitate capitalization, reuse and adaptation. Then, they have stressed the need of a tool to support their design sessions in order to produce scenarios more adapted to their heterogeneous public. Finally, considering the important turnover of their training staff, they wanted to capitalize the training know-how of experimented teachers, to be able to share it with novices ones and to provide assistance when trainers are involved in the design of a learning scenario. We worked with trainers of this association within an iterative participatory design methodology, in order to fit better with their needs. The results of this pilot study consists in (1) a design approach based on patterns [START_REF] Clayer | Pedagogical Design Schemes and Process for Instructional Design : With a Pattern-based and Teacher-centered Approach[END_REF], (2) an editing tool which allows different pedagogical design scheme models, (3) a way of sharing pedagogical scenarios in a community or, more exactly, patterns which could be instantiated by any member of a community, for his/her own design, and (4) an assistance system that guides teachers during the learning design activity, according to their pedagogical design scheme.

In this paper, we focus on the characterization of the assistance system we have developed for PARTAGE (section 3) and we relate the first experimental uses of the editor by trainers of the association (section 4) in a pilot study. We conclude this paper by some considerations on the possibility to generalize the assistance approach we have defined (section 5). The next section of this paper presents the relevant notions of patterns, user assistance, context-awareness and pedagogical design schemes.

ASSISTANCE FOR LEARNING DESIGN

Patterns

A pattern is a semi-structured description of an expert's method for solving a recurrent problem which includes a description of the problem itself and the context in which the method is suitable [START_REF] Lopisteguy | Design approaches in technology enhanced learning[END_REF]. Patterns are "good solutions" to deal with complexity characterizing the educational field [START_REF] Rohse | Design Patterns for Complex learning[END_REF]. This formalism offers the teacher an opportunity to externalize his knowledge [START_REF] Goodyear | Educational design and networked learning: Patterns, pattern language and design practice[END_REF] and can be formally expressed. A pattern is defined by three properties: a problem, the context of this problem and a solution. Each pattern captures the best way to solve a problem in a particular context. Patterns guide rather than prescribe [START_REF] Rohse | Design Patterns for Complex learning[END_REF]. A pattern language describes the relations between patterns (associated, composed of…) that capture the whole design process and can guide the designer through step-by-step design guidelines.

According to the Domain Specific Model approach we have adopted for this research work, a meta-model of patterns has been defined to describe the pattern language and a set of patterns has been elaborated and presented in [START_REF] Clayer | Pedagogical Design Schemes and Process for Instructional Design : With a Pattern-based and Teacher-centered Approach[END_REF]. [START_REF] Rech | Intelligent assistance in german software development: A survey[END_REF] defines several dimensions for an assistance system:

User assistance

 the presentation of assistance to the user;  the way to define assistance algorithms.

Each assistance system could reify the assistance by different kinds of actions:  The adaptation [START_REF] Andresen | Seeking Optimal IT Strategies by the Determination of Adaptability in Domain-Specific Software Applications[END_REF] is defined as a characteristic for a system to identify the capacity of this system to modify its structure according to situations or events.  The retro action [START_REF] Dufresne | Vers un modèle générique d'assistance aux acteurs du téléapprentissage[END_REF] improves the activity by highlighting or focusing on the elements to complete.  The advice suggests process or task to realize in order to reach user's goals.  The constraint ensures consistency with the element affected by this constraint. The user's task assistance we present in this paper implements these four kinds of actions, with a particular focus on the reuse of the pedagogical elements and scenarios.

Context awareness

Context-aware systems [START_REF] Bardram | Activity-Based Support for Mobility and Collaboration in Ubiquitous Computing[END_REF] are well-suited to support adequately the learning design activity of teachers and trainers. An assistance system uses context to provide information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user's task [START_REF] Dey | Towards a better understanding of context and context-awareness[END_REF]. User's task refers to the interaction between the system and the user during the design session.

Thus, we have proposed a learning design adaptive process based on the user's design context and the design activity. It addresses an automatic user modeling approach where the user's model is defined during a tool design activity session from user's characteristics (user profile, design session's context, and user skills) and its interaction with the system.

User models and user modeling are key elements for personalizing interaction. User modeling is motivated by differences in individual user's needs and characteristics and heterogeneity between different groups of people [START_REF] Razmerita | User Modeling, On the Role of User Models and User Modeling in Knowledge Management Systems[END_REF]). User's characteristics and interactions between the user and the system are relevant tracks to collect and will be used to help teachers/trainers to manage their learning design activity.

Pedagogical Design Schemes

The characteristics of a learning scenario are mainly conditioned by the choice of the pedagogical approach and the learning strategy [START_REF] Paquette | Instructional engineering for learning objects repositories networks[END_REF]. Commonly, communities of teachers could be identified by the same context of teaching: a class level, a learning domain, a pedagogical approach. More rarely is, for a community of teachers or trainers, the sharing of a particular pedagogical design scheme (PDS).

A pedagogical design scheme is the approach for designing a course, in our context, a learning scenario. A pedagogical design scheme is defined by an oriented graph of the pedagogical elements (e.g., in the context of IMS-LD, a role, an activity, a learning objective, etc.). The first pedagogical element defined by the designer is the root of the oriented graph and gives the orientation of the PDS. When practicing teachers design a learning scenario with the same design objective, the pedagogical design schemes could be different. For the same design problem, many pedagogical design schemes could exist. Some practitioners, depending on their experience or on the context of design, could start a design by defining resources of the scenario and then, in a second time, related activities and strategies. Some other designers will begin by describing objectives and intentions of the scenario first and associated activities and resources afterwards.

Early instructional design approaches have developed concepts for systematically designing instructional materials. The IMSL-LD specifications are based on a learner activity driven approach [START_REF] Koper | Representing the Learning Design of Units of Learning[END_REF]. This kind of languages provides best practice guides driven by the efficiency of the modeling rather than pedagogical design schemes. Editors developed for these languages want usually to instrument the modeling activity guided by a given design approach, underlying implicitly the interfaces. Some authors identified pedagogical design schemes driven by strategies and intentions. This kind of schemes supports the design process in the ISIS model [START_REF] Emin | Modélisation dirigée par les intentions pour la conception, le partage et la réutilisation de scénarios pédagogiques intégrant les technologies numériques[END_REF].

We think that, for tooling and supporting a design community of learning scenarios, one has to develop designs tools allowing different pedagogical designs schemes. Thus, we have developed such an editor and performed a pilot study with trainers of a same community of teaching for evaluating its usability.

ASSISTANCE IN DESIGN APPROACH

User designs pedagogical scenarios composed of pedagogical elements (activity, learning strategy, objective, role, material resource, learning situation, etc.) represented by patterns in our learning design approach. A simplified graphical description of a process pattern for the activity "Realize an individual evaluation/training" is proposed (Fig 1). To support the user during his design activity, we define (1) a "designer context", e.g. a data structure for capitalizing the information on the designer's pedagogical practices and actions, (2) a task model to identify the current design activity in accordance with the pedagogical design scheme of the designer, and (3) an assistance process which performs a set of assistance actions adapted to the designer context and the current activity.

Designer Context

A "context" is a structured set of information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity (a person, place or object) that is considered as relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves [START_REF] Dey | Towards a better understanding of context and context-awareness[END_REF].

In our approach, we refer to the context of a designer to qualify the context of a person, a user (a teacher or trainer) in his learning design activity. This designer context may be characterized by three facets: -The User Profile [START_REF] Amato | User profile modelling and applications to digital librairies[END_REF] is defined with the information based on the interaction with the system, user preferences and user knowledge. Examples of these data are: the level of adaptation expected in the tool (automatically, with the confirmation of the user, minimum adaptation), the login and password used to identify the user, etc. All of these data could be changed at any time by the designer. -The Design session's context is the context created during one design session. Each designer context saves the review of all design session's contexts (one by effective session, and by user). This context is composed of :

• The Pedagogical context qualifies learning strategies and objectives defined by the designer.

• The Institutional context is a set of information on the constraints, rules and resources imposed or available to the designer by his/her institution (in this paper, the association PARTAGE).

• The Domain gathers, by the help of keywords, the information concerning the concepts of the user learning domain.

• The Context of use gathers information during the designing session in order to qualify the nature of the task: the Pedagogical Design Scheme and Assistance actions. -The User's Skills are the skills the designer is supposed by the system to master, as far as he/she used the functionality of the tool (for example: "to reuse a pedagogical element" or "to link a role and an activity together"). User Profile is a static set of information filled by a form during the first session and/or actualized on designer's demand. Design session's context is updated by the assistance process during a design session. When a user creates a resource, this resource is capitalized in the Institutional context as a resource available inside the relative institution. User's Skills is the part of the context taking into account the user experience. It is updated depending the nature of the interaction and the user's actions.

Task model of design

Task models are useful for supporting the user during a session. With such a task model and by defining links between tasks and the interaction devices composing the user interface, an editor could provide context-sensitive, task-oriented support to the designer [START_REF] Pangoli | ACM Press, Automatic Generation of Task-oriented Help[END_REF]. Considering our objective, we have chosen to adapt the user task model defined in [START_REF] Paternò | Handbook of Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, Task Models in Interactive Software Systems[END_REF], as it is centered on the task of the user.

We have defined two levels in the task model: -The first level is the pedagogical design scheme itself. The pedagogical design scheme is updated after each task performed by the user. -The second level is a tree of tasks. The tree of tasks is associated with a category of pedagogical elements and represents the tasks that the user is able to perform during a design session with these pedagogical elements (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Partial Task-Model for the creation of an element.

Assistance actions

As described above, the assistance can lead on many kinds of actions (message of the system, guidance, adaptation…) [START_REF] Dufresne | Vers un modèle générique d'assistance aux acteurs du téléapprentissage[END_REF]. We have implemented four kinds of assistance actions in the assistance system: -Guiding: The system supports the user with a guide of practices, adapted to the current design activity. The textual information relative to the current action is highlighted and changes according to the next user's action. This assistance should enable the appropriation by the designer of the best practices of design regarding its Pedagogical Design Scheme.

-Consistency ensuring: The system informs the user if the current user's action has an impact on the coherence of the scenario. For example, if an activity is defined with a given resource, and if this resource is already registered in the system, the system informs the user that the resource exists and it can be added automatically to the current design model. This assistance ensures that the pedagogical scenario is consistent (by checking on the proprieties of elements, the meaning of combinations or associations of elements) at the end of the design session.

-Action anticipating: The system anticipates the next design action on the basis of the model-task, the pedagogical design scheme and the current design activity. Firstly, the pedagogical design scheme is used to identify the type of pedagogical element currently handled by the designer; then the task model associated to this pedagogical element is used to identify the current design activity. For example, if the user has created many activities, added a material resource and associated this resource to an activity according to its definition, the system verifies and creates all resources required by an activity (referenced in the definition of an activity).

Retroaction providing: The system uses the pedagogical design scheme and the current design activity to verify and modify each pedagogical elements of the current design activity. For example, if the user changes the prerequisites of an activity, then the system has to change the associated pedagogical elements.

The assistance actions are implemented by a rule-based system. A set of rules is defined for each design activity and inferred among a forward chaining, fired by user/system interaction events.

Assistance process

We have defined the assistance process as an iterative cycle of four steps, as the one synthesized in [START_REF] Lopisteguy | Design approaches in technology enhanced learning[END_REF].

-Step 1 "Collect information". The system collects information: the pedagogical design scheme of the session as well as the information describing the current user action and the designer context. -Step 2 "Qualification". The system identifies as the current design activity, the last activity started in the pedagogical design scheme. The context of the designer is updated with the information collected. -Step 3 "Diagnostic". The system searches in task-model the current activity and selects the set of rules associated. This set of rules is composed by rules for each type of assistance actions. The rules are contextualized (variables are valued with the collected information). Then, the current design session's context is checked in order to ensure the consistency. By analyzing the task model, the system selects the actions to anticipate. The guide is selected or updated regarding the current activity. The set of design session's contexts is used to provide retroactions. The user's skills and the level of assistance are updated in the user profile and used to fix the level of selected assistance actions. Finally, the system elicits the action(s) associated to the best contextualized rule(s) to be applied. -Step 4 "Adjustment". The system applies the qualified assistance actions and, if necessary, informs the designer of the assistance applied (example of message: "A new resource has been added to the scenario"). This assistance process is active along the whole design process [START_REF] Clayer | Pedagogical Design Schemes and Process for Instructional Design : With a Pattern-based and Teacher-centered Approach[END_REF]. We will highlight this process in the next section, with a first test out of an editor implementing this assistance process.

PILOT STUDY

Description of the pilot study

We realize a pilot study with the professional trainers of PARTAGE. Three main characteristics concern this association: -PARTAGE provides trainings essentially based on formative evaluations supported by classical pedagogical resources and methods (teacher-learner based strategy). -Pedagogical resources are not always welladapted to the public. Learners are adults unused to be trained and being at a loss with classical paper-based aid. Moreover, they often have difficulties with the basics knowledge of reading and writing or oral expression. -The association faces many changes within its trainers staff. This turnover doesn't facilitate the reuse and the sharing of the teaching know-how. This pilot study takes place in a design participatory approach [START_REF] Schuler | Participatory Design: Perspectives on Systems Design[END_REF]. Ten trainers of the association took part in this pilot study. The pilot study has been conducted during three iterations which have each occurred during a period of two or three weeks the last two years.

In a first step, after having observed and analyzed the practice of the association, we have proposed some patterns [START_REF] Clayer | Pedagogical Design Schemes and Process for Instructional Design : With a Pattern-based and Teacher-centered Approach[END_REF]) coconstructed with the trainers.

In a second step, during one of these sessions of participatory design, we have assigned the trainers with a new learning situation to design.

Each of them has designed a complete scenario of the learning situation, creating by the way many pedagogical elements. This was the opportunity for us to identify and then to model different Pedagogical Design Schemes.

We have then developed an editor, taking into account the PDS and the patterns previously formalized, and implementing the assistance process we have defined.

An editing tool

The editor is generated into the EMF-GMF framework [START_REF] Steinberg | EMF: Eclipse Modelling Framework[END_REF]. EMF-GMF framework supports fast update cycles of development for tools [START_REF] Krogmann | A Case Study on Model-Driven and Conventional Software Development: The Palladio Editor[END_REF]. The interface of the tool allows the designer to visualize the pedagogical elements he/she instantiates in a graphical view of the solution (Fig. 3-A). A toolbox provides the design primitives (pedagogical elements: objective, pedagogical strategy, material resource, human resource, activity, learning situation) (Fig. 3-B). Finally, a visual description for the information concerning the pedagogical element is accessible through the tab property (Fig. 3-C).

Test out of the assistance

In a third step we have proposed to two trainers to test out the editor. After a short introduction on how using the interface, we asked them to design a pedagogical scenario for a real training session to test the feasibility of our methodology. They design together the pedagogical scenario of a training session on "the risks related to population ageing". We present here the scenario of this design session to explain how the design assistance tool system works for supporting the user task.

The trainers decide to define first the pedagogical strategy. They select the pedagogical element "Strategy". The system collects this element (step 1 of the assistance process). The system identifies the current task "create strategy" and it adds it to the pedagogical design scheme model. A new strategy is added in the pedagogical context of the session context (step 2). The system selects the set of rules for the task "Create a new element" and contextualizes it. For each rule of the set, the system changes the default type of pedagogical element by "Strategy" (step 3). The system tries to apply contextualized rules but no condition on a rule is validated (step 4).

Then trainers decide to add a new element to the scenario instead of reusing an existing one. The system collects the user action (step 1). The assistance system identifies the current activity as "Start new element: from: strategy" and adds the activity to the pedagogical design scheme model (step 2). The system selects the set of rules for the task "Start new element" and contextualizes it (step 3). The system is looking for rules to apply. Two rules are validated and applied. The propriety "context" of the element is initialized to the value of the "context of the scenario" (consistency ensuring). An assistance guide exists to describe the best practices to "create a new element" (step 4). The context information is filled and the guide appears (guiding) (Fig 4).

Figure 4: Guide appears on the left on the screen Trainers define the name of the strategy "raise general awareness of the ageing". The system collects the name (step 1) and identifies the current activity as "Define Name: from: strategy" (step 2). The system selects the set of rules associated to "Define Name" and contextualizes it (step 3). The system tries to apply the set of rules. Only one rule has the condition to be validated and applied: the same name for the same type of pedagogical element was used in a previous design session associated to an objective (step 4). This objective and the link between the objective and the strategy are created and the system informs the user with a message box (action anticipating).

At anytime, the user can change the assistance level to reduce the number of messages or deactivate the assistance system.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

We have been approached by PARTAGE, an association in charge with back-to work programs, over helping them to improve their learning design activities. Some trainers were involved with us in an iterative participatory design research approach. We have elaborated in a first time a design approach based on patterns and co-constructed with the trainers some patterns which embodie their teaching know-how. In a second time, we have studied with them the assistance process and proposed a context-awareness system to support the design activity, based on pedagogical design schemes and task models. At the end of the pilot study, trainers have reused existing patterns and designed new ones, describing a pedagogical scenario of a learning situation.

The design assistance approach we have proposed is based on a pattern design methodology and has been elaborated by studying a community of trainers involved in specific training needs. In such an approach, patterns are specific to the community and indeed it was our main goal: to embody the know-how of a community of practice in order to allow the sharing and the reuse inside it. Moreover, by allowing both the reuse and the creation of patterns during the design of a learning scenario, we focus the design by the reuse and for the reuse, strengthening by the way the designer's awareness of membership of a community of practice.

To facilitate the design and with the aim of enhancing the reuse, we have proposed a design assistance process which could be considered as an epiphyte system (Giroux, 1996), that is to say the assistance process is implemented independently of the design one, but synchronized with each step of it, by the help of handlers on interaction events. These events are basic and generic primitive design actions (as "create", "modify", "add", etc.) and the set of rules we have defined could be instantiated on any set of pedagogical elements, even if we think that the pedagogical elements we have defined here are very standardized (activity, learning objective, role, etc.). Indeed, we improve our approach with another community of practice, computer sciences teachers in our university.

We claim this design and assistance approach we have proposed could be applied with benefits when one wants to (1) capitalize the know-how of an existing teaching community of practice, (2) reinforce the identity of such a community, (3) enhance the productivity of its members, and/or improve the quality of learning designs.

For this, we continue to realize pilot studies on design sessions with PARTAGE and to improve the set of existing patterns and the assistance process; we have started a study with another community in our university, focusing here on the reuse of the assistance process; and we need also to collaborate with other learning communities to improve the assistance rule-based system on another set of pedagogical elements, enlarge the set of pedagogical design schemes we have identified, and better take into account the evolution of the experience of the designer.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Simplified Graphical Form of a Pattern

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: The interface of editing tool.


Zeyneb Tadjine

Lahcen Oubahssi

Claudine Piau-Toffolon

Sébastien Iksal

Platform oriented semantic description of pattern-based learning scenarios

Keywords: Learning Design, learning platforms, operationalization, learning scenarios, patterns

In our research work, we address the issue of representing the learning scenario's concepts, in a learning platform. In this context, we have proposed a process for operationalizing pattern-based learning scenarios. We present the first two steps dealing with the new challenge of modeling deployable e-learning scenarios using Semantic Web technologies. It is primarily an ontology-based description of learning scenarios, which helps reducing the gap between human-readable and machine-readable vocabulary. We highlight the effectiveness of orienting teachers-designers, non-platform experts, toward creating adaptable and deployable learning scenarios. We defend that an assisted and platform-oriented design, allows the teachers to have a better pedagogical use of the embedded tools and features of learning platforms.

Aim and Motivation

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are more and more used by teachers, their use is not anymore restricted to content repository for distant learning [START_REF] El Mawas | Making explicit the Moodle instructional design language[END_REF] [START_REF] Oubahssi | Design and Operationalization of Learning Situations Based on Patterns for a Public in Professional Development[END_REF]. Nevertheless, we note that teachers find some difficulties using the LMS, especially when they are not platforms experts. The challenge is to easily master the process from the design to the operationalization of learning scenarios, for that, we believe that the operationalization of learning scenarios on LMSs is more than a technology-related question. Different research issues around instructional design are to be addressed in order to provide pedagogical expressiveness of the different elements within a learning scenario, while the design respects sufficiently the structure to describe the learning scenario [3] [4]. In our research, we seek to provide solutions to the problem of the automatic deployment of learning scenarios. We propose a process of the operationalization of pattern based learning scenarios [START_REF] Tadjine | A Process Using Ontology to Automate the Operationalization of Pattern-Based Learning Scenarios[END_REF]. The aim is to offer the use of a pattern formalism to create and edit learning scenarios, allowing the learning scenario design to be open enough to express teachers' concerns on one side and on the other side, structured enough to be machine interpretable for deployment purposes. In this paper we intend to mainly present a semantic model to help creating learning scenarios as a part of our process.

2

Structuring and Indexing Platform-Based Learning Scenarios

In order to define a clear idea of the way to address the challenge of properly design platform-oriented learning scenarios, we investigated the benefits, as well as the issues, regarding using a pattern-based LD tool by teachers-designers [START_REF] Oubahssi | Design and Operationalization of Learning Situations Based on Patterns for a Public in Professional Development[END_REF]. We studied the learning scenario from two viewpoints: (i) Starting from teachers intentions going down to its representation on an LMS, (ii) using a pattern-based design. This study allowed us to identify the assets (patterns formalism requirements and ontological modeling) leading us to automate the deployment of learning scenarios. As a result we have settled on semantically modeling and mapping the double vision: human intentions and platform representations for guaranteeing to teachers-designers a design tool able to assist them in deploying their learning scenarios with less effort of manual adaptations. We also proposed a classification of the different approaches dealing with learning design [START_REF] Laurillard | Teaching as a design science: Building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology[END_REF] [6] [START_REF] Koper | Modeling Units of Study from a Pedagogical Perspective: the pedagogical metamodel behind EML[END_REF], more specifically, those using ontologies as a semantic base to improve the learning process [START_REF] Chimalakonda | A Patterns-Based Approach for Modeling Instructional Design and TEL Systems[END_REF] [9] [10] [START_REF] Mizoguchi | Using ontological engineering to overcome common AI-ED problems[END_REF]. Although, all the effort made in developing systems to support the learning design process, literature has shown they had not yet reached a sufficient spread among teachers. We have noticed that most of the proposed design languages and tools do not preserve the semantic meaning of teachers' intention while transposing it on a LMS.

After that, we started collecting and structuring the available information and concepts related to the field of education [START_REF] Paquette | A Competency-Based Ontology for Learning Design Repositories[END_REF] [13] [START_REF] Lejeune | A Taxonomy for Scenario-Based Engineering[END_REF] [15] [START_REF] Koper | Modeling Units of Study from a Pedagogical Perspective: the pedagogical metamodel behind EML[END_REF]. We were concerned only by the learning scenario's concepts necessary to its deployment, justified by the fact that we focus our research on platform-oriented learning scenarios. This step is very important, since it is a key solution to index learning platforms pedagogical language into a general semantic description of a platform-oriented learning scenario. Studying the existing learning design repositories and theories where instructional scenarios can be modeled, we defined a five levels structure of the learning scenario, which represents the structuring step of our process. We believe that the right set of abstractions will give more benefits to easily map the human design language to the machine interpretable one. We had to make sure that the technological tools will easily support our proposed model. For that, the other point was to study an example of a deployed learning scenario. It consists in peer assessment of a synthesis. The course covers most of the features that Moodle 2.4 includes. Next, we explain an extract of concepts of our structure. We managed to introduce the most relevant concepts to deployment goals. The first level formalizes the notion of "learning scenario" in terms of structure and content, based on the different definitions researchers assigned to learning scenario [START_REF] Lejeune | A Taxonomy for Scenario-Based Engineering[END_REF]. A scenario describes roles, activities and also knowledge resources, tools and services necessary to the implementation of each activity. From all this emerges the most used concepts that summarizes the essence of a deployable learning scenario: the learning scenario structure is what defines in a design any sequential ordering of activities, it is mainly inspired from [START_REF] Lejeune | A Taxonomy for Scenario-Based Engineering[END_REF] research work, it is defined by a set of three concepts: "Structuration unit", "Activity sequence" and finally, "Elementary activity". This model was implemented as an ontology-based e-learning scenario model, using the Protégé tool 1 . Besides increasing the level of sharing content between teachers-designers, the ontological description will help us to ensure the support of the technological aspect for a learning scenario. Ontology will help teachers-designers to formalize pattern-based scenarios with the editing tool conformed to the conceptual framework we proposed.

The concept of "Elementary activity" is assigned to a category from bloom's taxonomy [START_REF] Krathwohl | A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview[END_REF], the categorisation will help the teacher to better create pedagogically reusable pattern-based learning scenarios, as well as it will help us to index it according to the most suitable platform tool. Any learning scenario has some necessary conditions and rules to be executed as teachers-designers intended, and since our learning scenarios are designed to be platform oriented in terms of design and deployment, we must take into account both the platforms and the pedagogical point of view. For that, we defined two sets of constraints. The first one concerns the human reasoning of the right conditions to manage the learning scenario, as for example the fact of restricting the access of an activity to the learners on the base of the previous activities results. The second set of constraints concerns the machine readable part of the scenario, although the previous ones are also machine interpretable, but they mostly relate to a pedagogical use, while the platform oriented set is fully built on computed learning environments. As we studied Moodle 2.4 platform, we retained the constraints adding a pedagogical dimension to the deployed scenario. We take the visibility constraint as an example, this added value allows the teacher to hide any activity for the learner until a time he judged suitable for his goals: it could be according to a score of a given evaluation, or a certain duration in time etc. We complete pedagogical goals and all others concepts describing evaluation in a learning scenario by all missing informations needed to operationalize an evaluation based scenario. The agent of evaluation could be the teacher, the students, in case of a peer assessment, and even the learning platform itself in case of an auto evaluation. We also note that an evaluation activity is a set of some evaluation tools, helping the teacher to assess students according to their needs: graded assessment, auto-evaluation, paper exam, quizz, with or without feedback etc.

After identifying our structure, helping teachers towards a platform-oriented learning design, we must ensure the mechanism to automatically transform their pedagogical intentions into modules and content on the targeted learning platform. Next, we show through an example the way we deducted our manual ontology alignments between the semantic descriptions of our pattern-based learning scenario and Moodle's pedagogical embedded language. We started by transforming the metamodel into a semantic description; this is a very important phase because it is the first step toward a platform semantic description as a form of an ontology. In order to align our two semantic descriptions, we studied the example presented earlier about peer assessment in Moodle, adding to that our collaboration with a pedagogical designer, to come up with the right mappings of Moodle's tools and features. Starting from the most frequently functions required by teachers-designers, we grouped the set of offered tools as follows: collaborative work tools (glossary, journal, wiki, workshop etc.), synchro-nous and asynchronous communicative tools work tools (forum, chat, and survey), learning tools (lesson) and evaluative tools (assignments, workshop, quizz, etc.). We believe that this work has to be refined with teachers' experiences using learning platforms, thus we highlight again the importance of using a semantic description because it is extensible, and allows indexing and adding of more features as the technological updates are evolving around distance learning.

http://protege.stanford.edu/