On the server side, it is a lightweight application that employs just a PHP & Mysql server. Based on the semantic paradigms of our approaches and by integrating ...
Utilizing Semantic Paradigms for Reconceptualization of WBTs: Toward a Meaningful Design Abdelhak Aqqal National School of Applied Sciences (ENSAJ), Department of Telecommunications Chouaib Doukkali University, Morocco
Najib Elkamoun Science and Technology of Information and Communication Lab Chouaib Doukkali University, Morocco
Abdelghafour Berraissoul National School of Applied Sciences (ENSAJ), Department of Telecommunications Chouaib Doukkali University, Morocco
1
Introduction
An instructor (at school or university as well in a company) is a domain expert first (Lehmann et al. 2006). In addition he has knowledge about methodology of education. In general he is not trained in technical skills especially tools for Web Based Training (WBT) authoring and media creation which are used to produce WBTs (Aqqal et al., 2008). Web Based Training production is complex and tool driven. It integrates many interrelated processes and can be considered from a wide range of viewpoints, paradigms and disciplines. Over the past sixteen years, many scientific and industrial approaches were purposed to support such production. So far, to product e-learning content is still difficult, timeconsuming and demands multidisciplinary skills (Pernin & Lejeune, 2006). Usually, the instructor fails to overcome the technical challenging process because of his lack of time and technical skills (Figure 1). Technical problems cause to instructors such stress in dealing with WBT production that semantic and didactic features are diluted in technical and media development (Meksoud, 2006). Therefore, the reasonably way to avoid this current difficulty is to adapt the WBT production process to the instructor capability, not the contrary (Aqqal et al., 2007) (Lehmann et al. 2006). Thus, a good production approach should support a natural way of working, which reduce to the minimum the technical efforts spent by the instructor in authoring and media creation, just according to his capability. For that, we have adopted a collaborative production, as proposed strategy, where authoring and media creation are done in a team being made up of experts involved at a distance in the same project. If so, such collaborative production will provide a better investment of the instructor energy
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for a better WBT delivery (Helic et al., 2002). At the heart of the WBT production, we should support the instructor in his domain of expertise especially in doing the instructional design and the structuring and expression of his domain knowledge away from technical content authoring and media creation. The technical tasks are to be delegated properly to other actors according to their profiles.
Instructional Design Abstractness
+ Domain knowledge structuring & expression
Usual teacher skills Added skills
Content authoring
-
Media creation Instructional
Skills
Technical
Figure 1: The overall skills required for WBT production.
Traditional ways of WBT production, as used usually by common instructors, are inadequate in the case of collaborative production (Pernin & Lejeune, 2006). A number of approaches that support WBT production have been proposed. Emphasis is given more on processes of content modeling and of authoring. The proposed authoring tools tend to provide similar functionalities. Outside such functionalities, sufficient technical possibilities are not provided to support a shift from an individual production to collaborative (or to cooperative) production. For example, how distant collaborators who are working together can communicate with an instructor, as a project leader, about his implicit intentions, expression of his domain knowledge and his semantic modeling to proceed to the production of the expected WBT. The main contribution of this research is the proposal of a solution to the above mentioned problems by developing a methodology to support the collaborative production of WBTs. By doing so, we hope to further encourage the instructors to produce their own WBTs, as well as to reuse created WBTs in an easy and efficient way. Figure 2 presents the overall architecture of our approach that supports, in addition to the content modeling and to the authoring, the semantic modeling of WBTs, namely the “Macro Design“. The methodology that we propose is based on division of labor as a way to produce WBT where processes of the production are clearly separated to meet the existing and needed skills of persons involved in WBT production. WBT production should be done in three different levels of abstraction: the semantic, logical and physical levels handled respectively by three processes: the Macro Design, the content modeling and the content authoring & media creation. In addition we define vertical to these processes a production management process in order to harmonize the collaboration between actors. In this chapter we focus particularly on the Macro Design, as a new process we have postulated which aims to take into account the capture of further information which are implicit and instructor-dependent to
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 3
fit the collaborative production. We first discuss the need of the Macro Design as an independent task in WBTs. We then describe how it does need to be set up adequately in order to be well adapted to the collaborative context and to get the needed expressivity of ideas, connectivity of users and interoperability of extracted information. Two contextual dimensions are investigated to justify our approach. The first deals with the cultural, technical and educational aspects which are related to the instructors’ thinking, while the second deals with the modeling of organizational aspects of a production workflow when it is done in a team and led by an instructor. The support of the Macro Design faces two challenges: one comes from an easy but formal and meaningful capturing of all needed information such as instructors’ design to contextualize the production accordingly and the other from the sharing of all these extracted information and conceptual knowledge among users that are working at a distance and are not having the same professional background. Our research discusses these challenges and proceeds to describe how our methodology, specifically the Macro Design, is elaborated utilizing semantic padigmes such ontology and taxonomies. In view of the above challenges, our goal is to check if utilizing new opportunities presented by semantic web padigmes and technology provide an interesting solution that meets the requirements of the Macro Design. We aim also to investigate the validity and usefulness of our approach when compared with the traditional production of WBTs.
Actors
Process
Process Management
Content modeling
Authoring & Media creation
Semantic level
Logical level
Overall Content Production Process
Macro design
WBT creation
Physical level
Figure 2: The proposed approach for the overall content production
The chapter is organized as follows. The so called “Macro Design” will be explained in the next section in detail. We will discuss the need of the Macro Design to build a semantic representation such ontology and taxonomies to guide a collaborative production. Section 3 describes the need of utilizing semantic paradigms as a mechanism to enhance the expressiveness of WBT design and to assist instructors when designing WBTs. We will also survey related work and discuss their shortcomings regarding our requirements. Then the elaboration of the Macro Design is presented. We shortly introduce in section 5 an environment that we have implemented as prototype composed of editors necessary for each level of the production in order to support our approach and to meet our requirements. An example is given to illustrate its scenario of use. Finally, we summarize some experiments we conducted for the evaluation of our approach, followed by a discussion.
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2 2.1
The Macro Design as an Independent Task in WBT Production The Need of the Macro Design From an Educational Point of View
Production of WBTs as it is done by instructors is an individual act mostly based on their thinking. Instructors’ thinking is depending on the cultural, technical and educational contexts in which their work is embedded such as instructors’ design, reflection, their understanding of knowledge domain, modelling of learners' profile, their didactic conceptions, implicit intentions and thought processes as well as their technical criteria of choosing adapted web based resources (Tochon, 2000). Consequently, instructors’ thinking must be included in the production process if any meaningful design is to occur. This is particularly indispensable when actors from different disciplinary backgrounds at all levels of production come to work under an instructor’s guidance. To Share with instructors the work of such production we should start on the one hand by identifying and understanding their thinking and design related to the expected content (aqqal et al., 2009). On the other hand, we should model the needed tasks appropriately according to their profiles and their technical and pedagogical contexts. The modeling of needed tasks requires a separation between production levels and identification of processes operating on these levels to enable a clean separation between jobs giving the instructor the opportunity to choose what to do and what to leave for his collaborators (Bachimont et al., 2004). Hence, we must start first by understanding and modeling practices of instructors when they create their own Web Based Training.
Macro design
Supporting team
WBT modeling
Instructor
Design Thinking
Authoring
Media Creation Implicit phase
Actor 1
Actor 2
Actor 3
Explicit phase
Figure 3: Modeling the WBT production to fit a collaborative context.
In contrast to existing ways of WBT production, we postulate a phase in an addition to content modeling, authoring and media creation which is often neglected or not fully taken into account, called the “the design thinking” (aqqal et al., 2007). This phase covers instructor’s ideas about what kind of WBT to produce, about a motive and reasons for a specific target group and about a list of themes that
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 5
need to be taught. Based on his design thinking, the instructor defines implicitly cognitive boundaries of main concepts of his WBT and semantic relations among these concepts according to both knowledge and learner domains. The design thinking is done in the mind of the instructor only. He could explain his ideas and intentions by speech or by writing it down. Tool support starts in the content modeling phase nowadays. Most times WBT modeling is done using a paradigm very similar to the form of a table of contents. Such a table of content records the main concepts which are used in content authoring only. The relationships between the main concepts as well as the instructional impact can not be expressed in such a simplified model. Being always only “in the instructor mind”, most of the design thinking and parts of the modeling implicit data evaporates as soon as another person is consigned with the authoring and if the WBT is produced. We introduce the “Macro Design” as an explicit modeling phase corresponding to the design thinking in order to record what instructors have in mind and to forward instructors ideas to all others involved in the WBT production from the instructional level to the technical level (Figure 3) (Aqqal et al., 2007). 2.2
The Need of the Macro Design from an Organizational Point of View
The literature review reveals a difficulty to find a single definition of collaborative production. The definitions are diverse and often surrounded by a certain conceptual vagueness. Sometimes authors use more than one definition in the same article. This is due particularly to the way how they model the collaborative work and integrates the social, organizational and technical aspects to achieve the objective. According to (Lowry et al., 2004), all these definitions could be grouped into a generic definition: an iterative and social process that involves a team focused on a common objective that negotiates, coordinates, and communicates during the creation of a common WBT. The collaborative production includes, in addition to the creation, every task that must be established prior to or at the end of the creation of content (e.g. planning or training). The objective of this part is to model the overall approach for coordinating the needed processes to support the collaborative production of WBTs (called also strategy of the collaborative production) in a way to fit skills of instructors. The strategy of the collaborative production must be clearly stated otherwise the coordination will be difficult. Based on an adaptation of the taxonomy proposed by (Lowry et al., 2004), as depicted in figure 4, we can summarize existing strategies of the collaborative production as follows: 1. In a group-a single author production, a group of actors establishes and agrees on the objectives and the project requirements. The production is then assigned to one member of the team. This strategy is commonly used when the consensus on expected results is easy to find and production of WBT is simple. 2. Sequential Production is an improved variation of a group-a single author production. In sequential mode the team members are working successively on the WBT. Each actor refines and updates a new version of the under working WBT then passes it on to the next person, and so on. The actors do not work simultaneously on the same version of the WBT. 3. Parallel production occurs when a team divides the WBT production into discrete units and works in parallel until the WBT is completely finalized. 4. Horizontal-Division production is a combination between the parallel and sequential mode and is based on a horizontal and a vertical subdivision of the work. The team divides the WBT into sub-
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parts and each part assigned to an actor. Once subparts are finalized, one (or several actors) reviews and gathers these subparts into a final WBT version. 5. The skills-based production is a customized parallel mode. The division of tasks is based on profiles and skills of each actor and not on a division of WBT into subparts. Each actor works on the elements related to his skills, such as designer on WBT modeling, the author is working on editing and graphics expert on the creation of interactive media. 6. In a reactive production, actors are geographically distributed and are working in real time to create a WBT. Creation and review of WBT parts are done simultaneously without any prior coordination or attribution of tasks.
WBT WBT
2- Sequential Production
1- Group Single-Author Production
Part 1
Part 2
WBT
3- Parallel Production
Part 3
WBT
4- Horizontal-Division Production
: Discussion Designer
: Modeling : Editing : Authoring
Author Media creator 5- Skills-Based Production
: Media creation
WBT
6- Reactive Production
Figure key
Figure 4: Existing strategies of the collaborative WBT production (based on an adaptation of the taxonomy proposed by (Lowry et al., 2004)).
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 7
The group-a single author production is a simple way that encourages consistency of style since the implementation is done by only one author. However, the produced WBT may not reflect the requirements, the intentions and the consensus established by the team under the instructor guidance. The sequential production presents the same limitations as the group-a single author production. It is an asynchronous team work with poor coordination. Social interactions are weakened and the sense of the group is reduced. Also, management information such copyright may be lost because the same content is updated by different actors. Sometimes an actor might be a kind of bottleneck and blocks the work process by his (her) slowness or lack of competence or motivation. The parallel mode is an efficient strategy that overcomes several problems of the sequential production. However, this mode becomes difficult in case of poor communication, of an ambiguous definition of the project requirements or when the attribution of tasks is not well balanced. Horizontal-Division production provides an improvement over the sequential mode. On the one hand, the subdivision of the production into subparts makes the work less complicated. On the other hand, the capture of content information (copyright information using metadata for example) becomes easier. However, if processes management is not comprehensible enough, some actors might lose the overall perception of what others are doing. In addition, criterion of the subdivision of production tasks (or into subparts) is often arbitrary. On this point, the skills-based production provides a solution. It supports better management of talent and enhances quality of WBT to be produced. However, skills-based production requires extensive planning and explicit definition of objectives and requirements in order to support processes management and to avoid information overload and redundancy. Finally, the reactive production is seen to be creative in some contexts especially due to the expansion of Web 2.0 applications. However, it remains extremely difficult to coordinate, processes management is not well supported and existing software does not effectively support this strategy. Through the previous discussion, we can conclude the following: first, setting a comprehensible and explicit plan of the work organization is essential to the creation and refinement of the production by keeping in view goals, purposes, the basis of coordination, strategy and actions will take place. It bridges between where we are and where we want to go. Second, if such plan is established it must be friendly and available to all actors involved in the production. The instructor, as a project manager, should provide in advance a formal view of the expectations he has in mind (i.e. what to do, why to do it, how to do it, when to do it, and who should do it) and confirms step by step the status of WBT production.
Part 1
Part 1
Part 2
Part 2
Part 3
Part 3
WBT
Figure 5: Example of a multimode strategy to support instructor in the collaborative WBT production.
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Chapter X -- Utilizing Semantic Paradigms for Reconceptualization of WBTs: Toward a Meaningful Design
The third conclusion is that if the production of a WBT is segmented into sub-tasks according to defined and rational criteria (e.g. according to skills) process management and capture of life cycle information will become easier. The fulfillment of the previous conclusions will enhance the quality of the WBT to be produced. In addition, we look for a truly flexible collaborative mode in which actors can work in parallel on different WBT parts to give to the instructor the opportunity to choose tasks he is able to do, just according to his profile. This work in parallel that we propose, based on skills, does not suppose necessarily that each actor plays a unique role in the production. For example, if a WBT is divided into three parts where for each part we need to support its modeling, its editing and its media creation, the instructor may choose to model the part 3, to model and to edit the part 2 and to be the "single author" of the part 1, of course, if he (or she) has all required expertise to create it (Figure 5). In this way, the needed strategy that can fit various profiles of instructors from an organizational point of view should be multimode and integrating actions of working on different parts at once. The next section presents the requirements to fulfill the previous conclusions and introduces the need of conceptual elements to support an enhanced synchronization of working actions taken under the instructor guidance. 2.3
The Requirements of the Macro Design
The Macro Design is required to freeze instructor ideas and implicit intentions and must go beyond a simple content modeling of resources to allow collaborative production and ensure consistency for the production workflow. Stated most simply, the macro design could be summarized into answering explicitly the following questions: 1. Why to produce a WBT and for which audience? 2. What to produce (in term of knowledge and in term of media)? 3. In which form to produce this WBT and why in this form? Such an exteriorization of knowledge exists only if related information is recorded and saved as representative models (Bachimont et al., 2004). This implies that it must be possible to (1) define adapted way for the information recording; (2), and ensure separately its availability before and after the WBT is produced. Here, our goal is to develop a mechanism supporting instructors to transform the intentions resulting from their design thinking into an explicit modeling given via small editing steps. Developed taxonomies WBT
Design Thinking
Intentions´ Information Macro Design Represented by
Knowledge Information Process management Information Content Information
To guide WBT modeling Authoring and media creation
Figure 6: The conceptual model of the Macro design.
Semantic level Logical level Physical level
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 9
To express the design thinking for each part a tool (specialized editor) is needed. Our goal is to build a tool to support the Macro Design without any overhead for the instructor. To realize this goal, the Macro Design has to meet the following requirements. (1) The most important aspect is that it has to be simple and intuitive. (2) It should be “pedagogically neutral”. The pedagogical neutrality means to not impose any pedagogical model as constraint for the instructor. This neutrality implies a modeling freedom which is indispensable aspect of the production clearness and easiness as well as the prevention of any semantic mismatch conflict between instructor intentions and the model mapping his intentions. (3) Besides, guidelines are needed to determine how the instructor should express his intentions, how to supervise and proceed the whole production process. This can be done by guiding him in a step-by-step guidance. (4) Finally, the overall approach including the Macro Design should support a collaborative production. This approach should be flexible, multimode and provide means that help all actors to perform the appropriate activities. As well, it should separate between production levels (Figure 1, 2) to allow an adaptation according to the instructor’s profile. The instructor must have the freedom to choose where he wants to stop in the process of production. From a technical viewpoint, the Macro Design must store at least four types of information: information about the intentions and educational contexts (e.g. didactic intentions), information about knowledge (e.g. the knowledge domain), information about content representation (e.g. media and style) and finally, information about process management (e.g. life cycle information) (Figure 6). Looking for the capture of all this information aims to guide the overall production and to enhance the team awareness and comprehension of the production context. These four types of information must be updated during the project in order to let actors converge towards a common understanding on the project status. In addition, a tentative to store this information as metadata and as a formal description will increase consequently the retrieval and the reuse of different parts of produced WBTs (Cramps, 2002). For example (Hoermann et al., 2005) confirm that the semiautomatic generation of metadata (based on XML and information of production) improves considerably retrieval and repurposing of learning objects.
3 3.1
Utilizing Semantic Paradigms to Support the Macro Design Towards Modeling of Design Thinking
Information is a contextualized data. Knowledge is information which has been integrated into a contextualized process. Knowledge utilization and management is the basic mechanism for any the collaborative framework. Therefore, we postulate: (1) Design Thinking as an implicit phase that holds important information for the collaborative production and (2) the Macro Design as an own process in the WBT production which should make explicit and formal the Design Thinking. Both Design thinking and Macro Design are not fully supported so far (aqqal et al., 2008) (aqqal et al., 2009). Therefore, we try to answer two fundamental questions: how to represent knowledge included in the Design Thinking? Which procedures and tools should be applied as support for that? Domain modeling is the most important part of this problem solving. Having a good model allows supporting team to have a common language that makes much simpler and efficient the communication of requirements and meaningful design of WBT (Moura & Derycke, 2007). We do consider “a domain” as ideas, intentions and concepts that instructor has in mind. A model is an abstraction that aims to represent, to illustrate and to explicit “a domain” by using conceptual tools and paradigms (Figure 7). A model is no domain equivalent but its representation for contextualized processes. In this section we will discuss the problems associated to the elaboration of
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the Macro Design. Our goal is to choose an approach and a formalism for representing and reasoning about knowledge and information of Design Thinking as a set of Domains that instructor has in mind. Based on the state of the art with respect to approaches related to representation of knowledge, we were also interested in how Semantic Web paradigms could support a semantic formalization, sharing and dissemination of knowledge. The knowledge that is contained in Design Thinking can be modeled at various levels of explicitation. Conceptually, the knowledge of Design Thinking could be seen as two conceptual plans (Figure 7): 1. A plan for the knowledge domain (e.g. history, medicine, algebra, etc...) that represents how an instructor conceptualizes the concepts to be taught. At the same level of abstraction the instructor conceptualizes also knowledge concerning the learners: their achievements (known concepts) and their socio-emotional profiles (personal’s information, preferences and learning styles). 2. A plan for the semantic information about content, which means how an instructor conceptualizes semantically knowledge about WBT content in terms of intentions, content modeling and semantic relationships between elements of this plan and the semantic relationships between elements of this plan and the elements of other plans. Knowledge Domain
Knowledge about learners
Abstraction
Domain
Model Domain modeling
Semantic Mapping
Learner modeling
Semantic about content
Semantic modeling of content
Content Modeling (e.g. Table of content) Figure 7: Modeling the Design Thinking in two levels (Knowledge modeling, Semantic modeling).
All kinds of knowledge in the Design Thinking could be represented using one or more knowledge representation techniques and for each part a specialized editor is needed to support the team, in particular the instructor, and to make such knowledge computer interpretable by using a formal language.
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 11
3.2
Proposal of Multi-paradigm Approach to Support the Macro Design
Our goal at this level is to choose the most appropriate approaches to represent the Design Thinking. Each of existing approach provides a coherent way of thinking and simplicity to analyze a problem and to solve it. However, when we try to analyze a complex problem, each of these approaches becomes too focused and hardly applicable to all aspects of the problem. The challenge is not to propose an approach which is supposed to be ideal and generic for all aspects of the Design Thinking, but rather to select a set of existing approaches based on their advantages and their limitations to fit the corresponding aspects of our problem (Smith et al., 02). The logical approach does not correspond to our need. As rule-based approach, it is rigid and not very intuitive for a non-expert user and it supports mostly the modeling of what is algorithmic. Even when the knowledge should be represented in a procedural way, other approaches, such the object approach, can be both representative of logic rules and easy for beginners. The declarative approach based on rules although widely used by expert systems, it has the same difficulties of the logical approach. In addition, our goal is not building an intelligent inference engine, but rather an expressive system of project specifications. Besides, the structured approach and object approach fit better modeling of highly structured knowledge. They are based on the idea that knowledge must be structured into classes of objects and relations between them. The idea of the object approach is conceptually attractive. Abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, hierarchy and instantiation are related concepts to the description of domain objects and computer operations. These concepts could help in our research, particularly in instantiation of objects from a semantic model to a concrete electronic form. From the methodological point of view, modularity and inheritance are two important concepts because they allow a better categorization and a consistent instantiation of objects and support an easy visual representation of knowledge. At this point, the semantic networks and conceptual graphs are useful too. Their intuitive graphical notation facilitates machine usability and a friendly communication. However, as mentioned in (Jouve, 2003), these two approaches can not model all dimensions of a semantic domain. The ontology approach is very efficient and is able to model all the semantic aspects related to the conceptualization of a domain. Such conceptualization provides a common understanding of certain domain between actors without any difficulty of expression or in updating concepts. The ontology supports an integration of various information and a separation between knowledge domain and how this knowledge could be taught (Natalya et al., 2009). Therefore, we propose to use ontology to support Domain & Learner Knowledge modeling (First plan of Design Thinking). Ontology is also a generic paradigm; it can model any teaching area, whether in literature, in science or in technology. If building ontology is sometimes time-consuming due to the difficulty of reaching a community consensus about conceptualization of a field, this difficulty is lighten in our case because there is no need to get a normalized consensus. The instructor conceptualizes explicitly and freely his WBT domain since we suppose he (or she) is the only expert in the team. As a research perspective, a collection and a comparative study of created ontolgies by many instructors about the same WBT could lead to a community consensus about the stated knowledge domain. We remind that the tool supporting conceptualization of knowledge should fulfill the requirement we specified for the Macro Design. Particularly, it should not require technical skills for developing an ontology. Ontology creation should be free, instructor friendly and guided. However, we found that ontologies are not the best solution to support semantic modeling of content (second plan of Design Thinking). First, ontologies are too generic for semantic modeling of WBT that appears to have limited patterns. Second, we emphasize that we are looking at this level of
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conceptualization to make the modeling process concrete. Hence, we propose to use taxonomies to support the semantic modeling of WBT. Semantic taxonomies in general are declarative classifications of different semantic elements in terms of a uniform vocabulary. On the one hand, taxonomies are also a rich paradigm but simple to use than ontologies. On the other hand, using taxonomies to categorize the most used elements in WBTs as stereotyped semantic classes helps to lead the semantic modeling and to support an easy production of WBTs. This easiness is based on: 1. Ease of decision: the use of taxonomies in the semantic modeling helps the instructor to make his choice without any confusion. 2. Formalization of decision: the choices are made formally through defined categories. Each category is explicitly described allowing users to get a uniformed vocabulary away from irrelevant information. 3. Ease of instantiation: the use of classes, based on the object approach, provides additional information about the instances and their attributes that the instructor can define. 4. Modularity: Modeling using classes is a method that provides a flexible utilization and adaptation to all actors involved in WBT production. Combining the use of taxonomies with the object approach allows us to overcome several problems. The use of taxonomies brought the semantic dimension that was missing in each object. The model in object gave to the taxonomy classes the depth and capability to shift from what is abstract to instantiated objects. However, as mentioned in the state of the art (Jouve, 2003) semantic meaning is dispersed at the object level and is not directly accessible as a whole. In addition, other dimensions that characterize the production of educational content, such as the rhetorical dimension (Rondeau, 2007), can not be captured by paradigms proposed so far. Hence, we need an approach that will serve as an additional mechanism integrating concepts of the proposed paradigms and support aspects which are missing. We propose the linguistic approach as an innovative way to overcome limits of proposed paradigms especially that the semantic modeling of WBT becomes close to the linguistic analysis and reasoning (Aqqal et al, 2008). For instance, such an approach can be used to detect inconsistencies and contradictions between different fragments of the semantic model (Jouve, 2003). 3.3
Related Work
Over the past years, many approaches (in academia and industry) were purposed to support the WBT production by tools (Pernin & Lejeune, 2006) (Aqqal et al., 2009). However, few suppose that the WBT production is done in a collaborative way supporting different roles and skills. Hence, using existing tools for a collaborative way of working will be quite fuzzy. In particular, these tools fail usually to support Macro Design as stated in the previous section (Aqqal et al., 2007). For instance, web page editors (e.g. Macromedia Dreamweaver, FrontPage and Netscape Composer) and text editors (e.g. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Open Office) support the authoring phase only. Contrary, course composers (e.g. WebCT, TopClass or Blackboard) and some educational modelling languages (e.g. TeachML, LMML) support rather the content modelling phase (Lehmann et al. 2006). WBT composers (e.g. Authorware, Toolbook, Mediator and Easy Prof) are professional WBT authoring tools and support both content modelling and authoring. Some academic approaches like GenDoc (Bachimont et al., 2004), ResourceCenter (Hoermann et al., 2005), WBT-Master (Helic et al., 2002) and SCENARI (Bachimont et al., 2004) could be listed in the same category too. But, generally, not all aspects of the macro design are considered in these approaches (Aqqal et al., 2009).
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 13
Unlike our requirements, the traditional way of WBT design focuses on a flat structuring of WBT toward developing a modular view to fulfill existing technical standards requirements (Verbert et al., 2006). Indeed, these standards (e.g. LOM, SCORM Content Aggregation Model) have been generally limited to the modeling of object-oriented schemas because they have put significant effort into developing mechanisms to manage the reuse of materials located in a repository in form of learning objects not necessarily semantically annotated. In addition, there are a number of taxonomies and ontology based models that conceptualize learning resources and their mapping to the knowledge domain. Verbert and Duval (Verbert et al., 2006) (Zouaq, et al., 06) studied six content models and showed that they could be mapped on their abstract model called ALOCoM (ALOCoM, 2005). So far, ALOCOM refers only to slide presentations as materials to be authored (Bergsträßer et al., 06). Similar approaches are found in (Bergsträßer et al., 06) and (Zouaq et al., 2006). Unfortunately, these approaches are based either on repurposing or retrieving existing resources and do not go beyond the traditional way of WBT authoring. On the didactic level, Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) is a relevant taxonomy to expresses educational objectives and serves as a sort of checklist to answer the first two questions listed in the section 2.3 rather than to follow all semantic connections of a WBT in terms of intentions, degree of modularity and the authoring process. IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) considers that the focus of learning is the activity and not the content. Thus, by being so abstract, generic and constructivist oriented, IMS-LD does not meet all our requirements (Aqqal et al., 2008).
4
Step by Step to Elaborate the Macro Design
4.1 Creation of Ontology to Support Modeling Knowledge Domain The goal of each training apart from skill training is to transfer knowledge from a given domain to the learner. This model of teaching is called Overlay model and is still the most used by instructors (Cramps, 2002). Formally it can be expressed as follows: Web Based Trainings transfer knowledge from the WBT knowledge domain (the WBT domain) to the learner knowledge domain (the learner domain). Both WBT domain and learner domain are collections of concepts, where a concept is an independent unit of knowledge. The learner domain is supposed to be a subset of the WBT domain before starting the training and should be equivalent to the WBT domain at the end. For example, “how to insert an image into a Web page” could be a concept in WBT domain called “HTML introduction”. Using such model is useful also in indexing relations between concepts of a knowledge domain and created media in a teaching context (Rondeau, 2007). So, the first step is to support the instructor in conceptualizing the knowledge domain and the learner model and to verbalize this conceptualization in a formalized and explicit format via ontology. Therefore, a specialized tool is needed. 4.2 Development of a Taxonomy For Semantic Units We distinguish in our area of application at least two kinds of taxonomies: (1) taxonomy used for the representation of the WBT into aggregation of semantic parts called semantic units and (2) taxonomy of semantic relations among these elements and the way they are connected in the WBT to reflect the instructor’s intentions and the knowledge mapping as well. To suit our scenario of use developed taxonomies have to support an instantiation by queries and should establish the correspondence between instantiated elements and the instructor’s intentions. It should also reinforce a separation between the different production levels so that each level will be mastered before progressing to the next. Using
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Chapter X -- Utilizing Semantic Paradigms for Reconceptualization of WBTs: Toward a Meaningful Design
taxonomies in this way for the WBT production provides many advantages over traditional authoring methodologies. Notably an increased separation of design and authoring levels as well as an abstraction mechanism to support a step-by-step production via suggested proposals given to the instructor instead of free-to-write forms. Thus the production is easy, fast, and deterministic. The next section introduces our developed taxonomies and their usage. To get a WBT model representing the ideas of an instructor, the instructor has to be supported to determine the elementary units of the WBT first. Additionally, a general way describing semantic interrelationships among these units should be provided. Many related authoring approaches proposed hypotheses about what constitutes an elementary WBT unit. These hypotheses are based either on logical criteria (e.g. paragraph, section) or physical criteria (e.g. size, layout, image or page) (Aqqal et al., 2008). For our scenario of use, we developed an initial taxonomy where we distinguish 8 types of WBT Units and their instances to fit the Macro Design adequately (table 1). Our segmentation of WBT documents is rather grounded on semantic basis, where fragmentation and modularization of WBT units is determined by the existence of a certain meaning or didactic function in each unit. This unit, called “a semantic unit”, serves as “abstract container” to contain an explicit description of parts of WBT to be produced. The semantic unit should be stand alone and didactically well-recognized. For instance, an illustration composed of an image and its description in paragraph format will be not considered as two units but only as one. This way of modelling fulfils our requirements. It leads to a separation between the different production’s levels. If so, the instructor has the ability to abstractly define desired content in form of a set of semantic units. Semantic Unit
Semantic Rule
Examples of instances
Principal unit
Concept presentation
Definition (concept, theory, etc.)
Alternative unit
Concept restatement / unit’s reformulation
Summary, abstract, preview
Illustration unit
Concept illustration
Simulation, elaboration, example
Activity unit
An activity description
According to the learning design
Assessment unit
Measure and evaluation of grasped knowledge
Test, exam, quiz, evaluation
Reference unit Supplement unit Connection unit
To refer or designate a used concept or unit Supplement, information about a concept/unit Join units to bridge semantic gabs & transitions
Metadata, glossary, references, bibliography FAQ, Help, Read more, index Background, planning, motivation, table of content
Table 1: The developed taxonomy of the semantic units in the WBT.
This taxonomy categorizes in a matrix typical semantic units and their instances needed for WBT production. It also assures a minimal associative linking between a given semantic unit and its “typical” logical formatting since those semantic units are composed of logical units and seem to respect certain aggregation likelihood.
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 15
4.3 Using RST to Support the Macro Design and Enrichment of Development Taxonomies So far, our intent was to generate a plausible taxonomy of a WBT’s units to allow the Macro Design. We have suggested in section 3.2 that a linguistic mechanism has to be found that could be a suitable framework for a design of a navigational model between semantic units and their mapping to the WBT domain. By this the intention why the WBT was produced in a certain form can be described. To preserve our prior concepts we have adopted the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as an additional mechanism to support the Macro Design. The RST is used, in our context, as a navigational model to contextualize and freeze the instructor’s intentions beyond a simple hierarchical structuring of sections. RST (Mann & Thompson, 1987) is a framework for analyzing discourse structure and speech statements by positing hierarchical relations between spans of text. These relations are defined functionally, in terms of what their intended effect on the reader is. RST has been chosen because it has many features meeting our requirements. First, RST is a natural and neutral mechanism for semantic modelling that specifies a rigorous set of annotation guidelines without imposing any prior model for the conception. Secondly, RST respects perfectly our developed semantic taxonomy and its requirements. It assumes that a text is divided semantically into autonomous units according to speaker intentions. These units are related by named rhetorical relations and structured into two kinds (a nucleus and a satellite) that reflect their importance according to the speaker’s intention. We also suppose that WBT segmenting (implicit or explicit) and relations between segmented elements reflect instructor intentions. RST was used for other domains and not only for text analysis and generation. For example, RST was used (1) to communicate animator intentions in cinematography where the author was replaced by an animator and the text was replaced by images (Kennedy et al. 02) (Taboada, 2006), (2) to support building of an ontology (called ISRST Ontology Model) for the organization and the generation of coherent events (i.e. stories, interactive games) using the relations proposed by the RST and storytelling (Nakasone & Ishizuka, 2007), (3) to formalize semantic models in XML (Nakasone & Ishizuka, 2007)), (4) to establish automatic, intention-based and multi-levels music composition as an additional tool for multimedia presentation systems (Zimmermann, 1996), and (5) to build a pedagogical agent that helps children (no-expert users) to learn and to author structured presentations about knowledge modeling and explanations of concepts by using some of RST semantic relations and RST analysis of a Web page, in a learning-by-teaching classroom context (Rizzo et al., 02). Finally, since the discourse generation and WBT production are two analogue processes and could be seen from a rhetoric point of view (Rondeau, 2007, Meksoud, 2006), the taxonomy of semantic relations developed already by the RST community (RST, 2007) is seen to be relevant for our scenario of use. This taxonomy of relations should be extended beyond the application area it was originally designed for. The extended taxonomy should be significant enough in converting the WBT structuring into a way to explore the instructor’s intentions.
5
Implementation and Experiences of An environment for WBT Production
5.1 Moulinette as a Support Environment For the Production of WBTs As an attempt to develop a proof of concept, we have designed and built a real implementation. The implemented environment (called Moulinette) is set of tools supporting the collaborative production under the instructor’s guidance with nearly transparent creation of Macro Design models. The aim is to demonstrate the utility, the technical feasibility and the usability of a Macro Design based production,
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according to our requirements and improvement we have proposed. Moulinette is a 100% web based application that was developed by using only free and accessible web languages (e.g. PHP, Mysql, Java and Ajax) and adapting some friendly open-source programmes and plug-ins ( e.g. S3DB and dhtmlxTree). Utilizing Moulinette is very easy and does not require any prior knowledge. On the client side, it is zero-installation solution and need just a browser. On the server side, it is a lightweight application that employs just a PHP & Mysql server. Based on the semantic paradigms of our approaches and by integrating the needed editors for the production, Moulinette consists of the following components (Figure 8): (1) Teams’ manager: management of users' accounts and their groups, attribution of privileges and storing information about sessions. (2) Project manager: description board, status of the work in progress, integration of editors and elements of the projects. (3) Editor of Knowledge modeling: collaborative creation of ontology and learners model, import and export of ontology in XML and in RDF, mapping the concepts of knowledge domain to the semantic model, visualization of created ontologies in textual and in graphical modes. (4) Editor of semantic modeling: creation, description and instantiation of semantic units, import and export of semantic model in XML, visualization of created semantic model in textual and in graphical modes, description by metadata. (5) Editor of content modeling: logical structuring of resources and generation of table of contents. (6) Web editor of semantic units: advanced authoring of semantic units, definition of production status of each unit, Editing and preview, import and export in HTML or to a SCORM-compliant file.
Figure 8: Screenshot of some editors of Moulinette: (1) Welcome page (top-left), (2) Ontology Editor (top-right), (3) Project manager (bottom-left) and (4) Editor of semantic units.
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 17
Moulinette integrates then a set of editors that could be used also separately as standalone tools and each editor provides the basic functionalities: Create Edit, Update, Browse, Delete and Export. 5.2 Scenario of Use Moulinette allows a team to work on many WBT projects in a collaborative way. Therefore, an instructor as project manger creates a new project and adds Design thinking information to it. Functions which manipulate the project explicit description are directly accessible with the toolbar of editors we described above. Moulinette editors allow the instructor to express his Macro Design (didactic modeling, domain knowledge modeling and WBT segmenting & semantic modeling) for the ongoing production process. To understand, we simplify briefly in the following figure an example of design via Moulinette from a given learner and WBT domains to a concrete WBT. In this example (Figure 9), the WBT semantic modeling shows only WBT segmenting into didactic elements and rhetorical relations among them to express some of the instructor’s intentions. Here, the first thing which has to be considered is what the concepts that the WBT domain should include are, and what the concepts known by the learner (i.e. Learner domain) are. This specification will be quite easy since we have adopted a neutral and simple way of knowledge modeling. The instructor creates the ontology of his WBT domain concept by concept and inserts semantic relations between these concepts using taxonomy we provide. Then, the learner model is specified either in a free way or in associating deterministic values (i.e. known/not known concepts) to learners categories (i.e. beginner, intermediate an advanced). This ontology could be either visualized in interactive and friendly graphs or exported in XML or in RDF for a later reuse.
a WBT domain Concept 2
Concept 3
Concept 1
Concept 4
Nucleu
Background
Satellite
s
Abstract
Definition of The concept 4 Illustration for beginners
Example
Didactic link
Semantic model of WBT
Restatement
Introduction Restatement
Authoring and media creation
WBT modeling
A learner model
Conclusion
Assess ment Test
Activity Summ ary
Referencing Bibliography
Instantiation link
Indexing link
Figure 9: Example of using semantic paradigms to support the Macro Design via Moulinette.
The second step is to map those concepts to certain semantic units which serve as abstract containers of knowledge. All information which is needed about each semantic unit has to be defined explicitly such its
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Chapter X -- Utilizing Semantic Paradigms for Reconceptualization of WBTs: Toward a Meaningful Design
mapping to given concepts, its semantic features or rules (e.g. nucleus/satellite), its intentional relations with other units and authoring properties if required. This specification is based on the RST framework and on our developed taxonomies. Editor of semantic modeling provides the same functionalities and same friendliness as the editor of knowledge modeling. Later on, the resulting representation of the WBT when it is completed should be instantiated into a specific WBT model so that the last step to do is to enable this model by authoring and creating needed media via the corresponding editors (i.e. Editor of content modeling and Web editor of semantic units). The modeling and authoring of WBTs must fulfill the representation and requirements given by the instructor and should be done via iterations by the process management using Project manager of Moulinette. Finally, the export function can be found on the toolbar of Project manager to save the WBT package either in HTML or in SCORM-compliant content package. To ensure a flexible production and to enhance repurposing chances, actors work in vertical an in o horizontal according to the instructor request while actions and descriptions that are done are meticulously stored as semantic metadata. 5.3 Experiences in the Utilization of the Proposed Methodology an its Support Environment
In the previous section we summarized the main functionalities of the created prototype that serves as a proof of concept to turn our approach into a reality. Our main goal at this phase was to evaluate how the methodology we have proposed in this chapter will work in practice and if utilizing semantic paradigms were sufficient in the case of the Macro Design. For this purpose we choose to implement a qualitative model based on the model of Nielsen (Nielsen, 1993). This model was chosen because it fits well the evaluation of Web based environments and helps to get back qualitative appreciations of end users. The number of evaluators was not the focus of this evaluation, assuming that on average 5 evaluators identify 75-80% of usability (Nielsen, 1993). During the evaluation we aim to check contexts where our approach could be an acceptable solution and to measure the extent to which the implemented editors meet our requirements. Therefore our evaluation took place through the following criteria; evaluation according to: (1) a variation of education fields (i.e. scientific, technology and literature), (2) a variation of education levels of learners (i.e. university, high school and school), (3) a variation of utilized pedagogical models and (4) a variation of technical skills of instructor in WBT production (i.e. Advanced, intermediate and beginner). Besides, evaluation depends at least on two factors. First, the factor of social acceptability, which refers to the fact of whether the use of Moulinette (as a methodology & as a tool) is conform to social norms and culture of instructors. Instructors might resist the use of a system, even sophisticated, if it does not respect their culture and their way of working. Second, the factor of practical acceptability which refers to two aspects: (1) utility and scientific legitimacy of its theoretical basics. At this point, we aim particularly to evaluate how the Macro Design by its models can represent the Design Thinking and guide the production processes of WBTs, (2) Usability and ease of use. Based on our evaluation model, four experimentations took place in the period between October 2008 and May 2009 and led to the production of WBTs (aqqal et al., 2009). We have used interviews and analysis of session's data to rate utility, acceptability and usability of Moulinette. We summarize in the following the overall conclusions regarding the results we got from the experiences. First, (1) users have found that Moulinette is familiar to their way of thinking and it is using usable web technologies however they suggested that quick-to-start tutorial is needed. (2) They have confirmed that Moulinette is easy, generic and do sufficiently support the Macro Design of WBTs. (3) Almost all required functionalities were implemented. Needed improvements and few programming errors were identified but are not critical for the overall use. Second, we have confirmed the benefit of doing WBT
Abdelhak Aqqal, Najib Elkamoun & Abdelghafour Berraissoul 19
production in collaborative way such assisting instructors and helping to develop of informative and social skills (Jullien et al., 2007) among collaborators. The methodology we proposed to support the collaborative production is socially acceptable; however in some cases instructors might be reticent to share explicitly confidential knowledge or intentions in a team (e.g. production of online exams). Our methodology is innovative and provides advantages over traditional way of WBTs production. First, it allowed us to capture explicitly very useful information about intentions. The results of our experiences show that intentions we have captured are of three kinds (i.e. Pedagogical intentions, didactic intentions and intentions related either to the culture of the teacher or of the learner). Second, it extends the existing way of content design by supporting instructors in expliciting also their Knowledge modeling and instructional design. Moulinette was used to create ontologies in a collaborative way (during the 1st and 3rd experiences). Moulinette has made possible the reuse of a created ontology during the first experience in the 4th experience through XML export and import functionalities. In our case, the ontology is built independently from the content itself or from the pedagogical model. The added value of this independence has been mentioned by (Meksoud, 2006). Third, utilizing semantic paradigms (i.e. RST, ontologies and taxonomies) is a solid method that has allowed instructors to specify their models in a formal, explicit and argumentative way. In addition to the aspects concerning the expression of intentions and knowledge modeling, Moulinette has allowed instructors to make a specification of requirements related to the production of semantic units and their formatting. However, we found that specification of all semantic information and browsing all this information becomes difficult if the module contains a large number of concepts or semantic units (a problem already mentioned by (Cramps, 2002)). Hence, we have tried to solve this problem by using semi-formal forms and autocompletion based specifications, different colors and types of interactive graphs. Information was also presented alternatively in textual form. We learned also that segmenting WBTs into semantic units helps to model the workflow in way that fits reasonably the profile of the instructor involved in the production. The following figure is an illustration of this fact. During the third experience the instructor has defined a set of semantic units then has decided tasks he was able to perform. a WBT
Semantic
Logical
Physical
Semantic unit 1 Instructor Semantic unit 2 Semantic unit 3 …… Semantic unit n
…
…
…
Expert1
Semantic unit n+1
Expert2
Expert3 Figure 10: Use Case (3rd experience) in supporting instructor in the WBT production.
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Chapter X -- Utilizing Semantic Paradigms for Reconceptualization of WBTs: Toward a Meaningful Design
The grey zone in Figure 10 shows the minimum corresponding to the instructor profile and technical expertise regarding that WBT. Experts have worked vertically and horizontally to finalize the remaining tasks. Finally, recording all actions taken by users during the production helped us solve some problems related to lifecycle information of content and to the management of copyright in collaborative environment.
6 Conclusions An instructor is a domain expert first. He (or she) usually lacks technical skills to produce Web Based Trainings (WBTs). The collaborative production could be a solution to meet instructor’s skills in this case. However, describing, defining and specifying information that supports collaborative production of WBTs requires meaningful models of the overall context and work to avoid any misleading during the production’s achievement. Prior to the work, the instructor should generate different types of information about the overall production process and steps. Such information may be presented in semantic objects or knowledge models to serve as points of comprehension and as a support to guide his collaborators. The more of these information evidenced by the instructor and the higher the level of representation of the information, the more efficient the guidance will be. So far, instructors often maintain their own conceptualization of the expected WBTs in their mind. Existing tools provide little, generic or no semantic representation of the overall process. The instructors’ conceptualization is represented in limited ways that are not sufficiently explicit and how to approach production requirements is not immediately obvious from within the tool. In this chapter, an innovative approach is illustrated whose central objectives were improvement of the quality and relevance of the design representation of WBTs provided to a team. This chapter contributes to the reconceptualization of the WBTs, from enhancing a traditional model of WBTs, typically organized in hierarchical structure, to an explicit and formalized representation in the form of what has been called the Macro Design. The Macro Design, as a concept, proposes the utilization of semantic paradigms, such anthologies and taxonomies we developed, in supporting instructors to conceptualize WBTs in terms of external models which will be accessible before and during tasks’ progression or for a later on retrieval, use or re-use of the production outcomes. As a proofof-concept a tool has been created and has shown very promising results.
References ALOCoM , (2005), http://memling.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/alocom/documentation.php Aqqal A., Rensing C., & Steinmetz R., (2007). The Macro Design as an Own Task in WBT Production: Ideas, Concepts and a Tool”, Creating New Learning Experiences on a Global Scale, EC-TEL 2007, Springer-Verlag , September 2007, p. 420425. Aqqal A., Rensing C., Steinmetz R., Elkamoun N., & Berraissoul A., (2008). Using Taxonomies to Support the Macro Design Process for the Production of Web Based Trainings, Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 14, n° 10, 2008, p. 17631774. Aqqal A., Elkamoun N., Rensing C., Berraissoul A., & Steinmetz R., (2009). Vers une construction représentationnelle de la pensée pédagogique des enseignants - Le cas du Macro Design des documents numériques pédagogiques. In: Journal of Document Numérique, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 81-110, August 2009. ISSN 1279-5127. Bachimont B., Crozat S., & Mallard R., (2004). Managing learning content and digital formats, E-Learning for international markets: Development and use of eLearning in Europe, 2004.
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