Bridging the Gap between Practitioners and E-learning Standards: A Domain-specific Modeling Approach

Developing activity-centric e-pedagogies using IMS LD is difficult for average practitioners because pedagogical knowledge and technical knowledge is required. Through using peer assessment as an exemplary pedagogy, this paper presents a domain-specific modeling (DSM) approach to a new generation of LD authoring tool, for enabling practitioners to develop activity-centric e-pedagogies. Adopting a DSM approach, on the one hand, pedagogic experts develop a pedagogy-specific modeling language, in which notations are directly chosen from the concepts and rules used to describe pedagogic approaches. On the other hand, technical experts develop transformation algorithms, which will map the models represented in the pedagogy-specific modeling language into machine-interpretable code represented in an executable language like IMS LD. The feasibility of this approach has been demonstrated through developing a peer assessment authoring tool.