Assessing CIAN as modeling language of collaborative learning activities

Learning Design (LD) involves the specification of learning/teaching activities. Therefore there are several standards and modeling languages and highlighted between them is the IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) standard. However, the use of higher level abstraction notations can significantly facilitate the creation of these designs. In particular, our interest is centered around the modeling of group learning activities, for which the current standards present some limitations. In this paper we will identify the main features to consider for modeling collaborative tasks, and we propose the use of the CIAN notation for this purpose. Finally, we will give detailed explanations of experiments to assess the quality/validity of that notation, and its acceptance by the designers of CSCL systems.