Improving the design of courses thanks to graphical and external dedicated languages: a Moodle experimentation

Designing learning scenarios and exploiting them for setting up a learning situation on Moodle is still a complex task. Visual Instructional Design Languages and their dedicated graphical editors have been identified as important conceptual tools for achieving more creative design solutions within a design process. However, binding and operationalizing such learning models is not tackled for now. In this article we propose the specification and development of visual languages and editors 1/ dedicated to Learning Management Systems like Moodle, and 2/ taking into account specific instructional expressiveness from communities of practices. This original approach requires the identification and formalization of the LMSs implicit and internal instructional design language. It also requires the development and addition to the LMS of a dedicated API in order to expose this proprietary format for communicating inside and outside LMSs. Then, we propose to use this LMS semantics as a base for the specification of external instructional languages. We follow a theoretical, methodological and technological research framework based on the Domain-Specific Modelling domain. Such software engineering domain provides some relevant tooling and techniques for assisting and guiding the elaboration of domain-specific languages. All our experimentations and development prototypes have been focused on the Moodle platform. These first propositions and results are presented. Also, a dedicated funded research project has just started in order to deeper address the highlighted issues and objectives.