Identification and Formalization of LMS Instructional Design Languages: Moodle Case Study

Many universities have adopted Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to offer teachers a range of pedagogical and administrative tools for supporting teaching and learning activities. However, many teachers have diffi‐ culty using these LMSs; they have to encompass the LMS technical features and services in order to understand the underlying way of designing. Despite the use of external editors, instructional engineers don’t see the relationship between “how they design a learning scenario” and “how the learning session can be set up within the target LMS”. If LMSs could be able to make explicit their intrinsic and implicit learning design model, it can be exploited as a proprietary format to build tools and facilities dedicated to this LMS. The research presented in this paper aims to present our method in terms of necessary analysis and steps for the identification and the formalization of such LMSs’ instructional design languages. The method takes into account three different viewpoints: a viewpoint centred on the LMS macro-HMIs (Human-Machine Interfaces), a functional viewpoint and a micro viewpoint. We validate the proposed method by applying this formalization on two versions of Moodle.