Our works focus on Collaborative Problem-based Learning (PBL) environments that provide students with resources, guidance and instruction. Our research team emphasizes the role of the designer producing socio-constructivist scenarios which are sequences of phases, tasks and activities including resource discovery, discussion, resource production and feedback. The research work consists in both proposing models and engineering such collaborative PBL environments.

Most collaborative PBL environments are implemented on either monolithic commercial Learning Management Systems providing Collaborative Support Capabilities (whiteboards, chats, …) or some specific applications of available collaborative technologies (java RMI, P2P, …). As a consequence, reuse of any available powerful educational functionality and reproducibility of published experimentations are quite restricted: this puts a brake on advances on collaborative PBL environments.

To address these problems, we promote an application of Component Based Development that consists in engineering educational resources and gluing them to produce a learning environment fitted to a particular learning scenario. We propose a model driven approach for developing cooperative PBL environments; this approach consists in making explicit, in connecting and documenting both the specifications of a learning scenario and the « resources » that it requires. Two types of resources are to be finely tuned with a socio-constructivist learning scenario: we try to contextualize and specialise both the software components and the electronic documents that the actors (learners, tutors) will exploit while interacting according to a given scenario. To contextualize such resources, we jointly investigated some design and implementation issues:

The approach consists in providing pedagogues with an interface enabling them to put and use such tag-layers:

We are applying this approach to design and implement a cooperative PBL situation called Smash which is dedicated to the apprenticeship of good driving behaviours: The Smash PBLS is a learning situation in which groups of learners investigate and interact about an accident from a set of scenarised documents such as witnesses, a map of the streets, etc. We first specified the Smash PBLS from the CPM Metamodel. Then we mark documents with spatial, temporal and narrative semantic tags. From this specification, we are developing various prototypes of a component called ”the Conflict_Manager” that provides functionality for initiating and regulating synchronous interactions between learners when they have contradictory interpretations of the documents put at their disposal. This tool embeds a set of components that can exploit the content of the provided witnesses: a Whiteboard, a Chat, a component for the analysis of the interactions about given witnesses, a component for the generation of just-in-time solicitations of the learners. The glue between these components is constrained by the Smash scenario

Our aim is to embed components such as the Conflict Manager in a Learning Management System (LMS) in order to put these components at the learners disposal. This approach impacts the technology to be used, as described in the next paragraph.

Tagged Documents generated by the Linguastream platform are XML files. Socio-constructivist learning scenarios produced from the CPM Profile are UML/XMI files that we implement as software components to be embedded in a Learning Management System (LMS). These software components must extend the functionality of such an LMS which then gives access not only to lectures, websites, quizzes, etc. but also to those socio-constructivist learning scenarios.

In this paper, we have presented our current research projects that extensively rely on UML as a modelling language, on XML and open-source Java technology as an implementation framework. We consider that EJOSA and OpenUSS are key elements to carry these projects to a successful conclusion. However, although their capabilities (extensibility, scalability, etc), we do not ignore the complexity of such J2EE solutions and we still encounter difficulties for developing new components from the EJOSA framework. As leaders of PhD students, we need to convince our students that investigating this powerful but complex framework is worth the effort. The EJOSA and OpenUSS community could help us in this challenge if they could provide people interested in these technologies with more documentation and tutorials.

References

Bilhaut, F., Charnois, P., Enjalbert, P. and Mathet, Y., Passage Extraction in Geographical Documents, Proceedings of New Trends in Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining (IIPWM), Zakopane (Poland), 2003.