From Electronic Documents to Problem-based Learning Environments: an ongoing Challenge for Educational Modeling Languages

This work reports an evaluation of two Educational Modeling Languages for the design of environments dedicated to Problem-Based Learning (PBL) situations. Firstly, we assess the expressivity of the IMS-LD language against the requirements of the Smash case-study. Considering the limits of the IMS-LD language, we present some capabilities of the CPM language to describe other views representing contextual didactic choices (actions and events) that IMS-LD cannot afford. An analysis of the details of these CPM views has shown that they refer to learning/tutoring actions to be performed from the semantics of the electronic documents exploited in the Smash situation. Since it is a widely shared tendency to specify learning activities that take advantage of the information embedded in documents, we present some techniques, methods and tools to engineer together the educational capabilities of a corpus of electronic documents and the dynamics of learning activities enhancing the value of such a corpus. The only documents addressed by these research works are those embedding spatial and temporal information.