Formal Representations of Learning Scenarios: A Methodology to Configure E-Learning Systems

Nowadays, advanced E-Learning systems are generally pedagogy-aware. Commonly, these systems include facilities for defining so-called learning scenarios that reflect sophisticated pedagogical approaches such as collaborative writing or project-oriented learning. To support different learning activities from such scenarios the technological infrastructure of these systems must be appropriately adjusted and configured. Usually, this configuration process is laced with a number of difficulties. Most of these difficulties are caused by the fact that scenario capturing is achieved through informal user-developer dialogues. Typically, the result of such informal dialogues contains inconsistent and incomplete information because of misunderstandings and the complexity of the interactions within a scenario. Consequently, the configuration of the system is suboptimal and a number of iterations are required in order to achieve better results. In this paper an approach to improve this situation is presented. This approach is based on a general formal representation model for describing learning scenarios. A particular formal description of a concrete learning scenario is obtained through a user dialogue with a wizard tool. At the next step, this formal description might be automatically processed to facilitate configuration process. The paper is concluded with some experiences gained by applying this approach in two E-Learning projects.