Analyzing requirements with the digital learning ecosystem approach

Requirements analysis is a fundamental phase in the development of digital tools and concentrates essentially on computational aspects consisting on the identification of input and output flows as well as processing. Nevertheless, requirements analysis is difficult to conduct when contents and relations are complex and dynamic. Recently, the ecosystem approach has been used to understand and model phenomena that appear from the technology and its use. We propose to use this approach to conceive new digital learning tools during the requirements analysis. In this paper we present a digital learning ecosystem definition and a model that can be applied to the conception of new educational tools. The detailed model includes a set of artefacts that support its application. The model applicability evaluation was achieved by applying it on previously developed study cases and showed how this approach revealed aspects that were not considered with traditional requirements analysis methods.