Operationalization of Learning Scenarios on Existent Learning Management Systems - The Moodle Case-study

Despite the increasing number of Technology Enhanced Learning platforms (eg. MOODLE) and their wide spreading, the operationalization of learning scenarios is still a problem for teachers. We aim to facilitate their implementation on existent platforms. We propose an approach based on the formalization of the implicit instructional design domain language embedded by these Learning Management Systems. It consists to identify and formalize this specific language in order to use it as a mean of communication with external design tools without losing the semantic of the designed scenarios. The originality of our approach relies in performing the scenarios operationalization by the development of a communication API based on the formalized language of the platform. Our proposal is also based on the application of theories and practices from the Domain Specific Modeling domain in order to formalize the domain language, to specify some graphical languages on top of it, and to help in the development of dedicated graphical editors. This paper details the implementation of our proposal (API and first editor) on the MOODLE platform.