A Separation of Concerns Approach to Educational Modeling Languages

This paper presents a separation of concerns approach to educational modeling languages (EMLs). Basically, it proposes to structure these languages in a way different from the one proposed by the IMS learning design (LD) specification, currently considered as the standard EML. In our opinion the LD specification is very complex. It is difficult to develop design and runtime applications and to produce EML-educational materials. Therefore, our goal is to simplify the complexity under EMLs providing a more structured solution. The main idea is not to attain the modeling of educational materials as a whole problem, but to divide it in several separated concerns that could be solved part by part. Two different kinds of parts are proposed: perspectives and aspects. In addition, flexibility is considered to support modifications. The paper introduces the theoretical ideas of the proposal and a modeling example