Title: A pedagogical model for e-learning tools design: a semiotic engineering approach

E-learning tools design is intended to mediate communication between the student (user) and the software involving teacher intervention. The design process could be taken as a dialogue between teacher and student. Thus, the main actors in the teaching/learning process are involved during the software-design process in this semiotic perspective. We aim to introduce a model for designing e-learning tools that allows communication of the intentions that both the student and the teacher specified during the design process. This model is based on the semiotic engineering approach, which incorporates the communicability concept as a property of software to convey efficiently and effectively its underlying intent design and interactivity principles to users. We integrated the ‘semiosis’ and ‘enunciation’ concepts arising from the semiotic discipline into this model. The ‘pedagogical enunciation model’ consists of four elements: teacher model, student model, learning principles, and system design. The first three elements need to be defined, and the system design is built based on the enunciation concept. An example in the life science domain is shown, developing an enunciation about how to transform the items of the three model elements into a system design as a fourth model element.