Engineering and Reengineering of Technology Enhanced Learning Scenarios Using Context Awareness Processes

Abstract

This chapter proposes a context modeling process to help tutors adapt their tutorship actions based on students’ profiles and performance on Technology Enhanced Learning environments (TEL). It attempts also to involve teachers as designers in the engineering process of a TEL system development and to support their activity of auto-regulation regarding the students’ guidance and assistance. This aim leads to improve teaching strategies as well as to enhance the quality of the learning objects and the learning scenario itself. In fact, if the TEL system is already adaptive, by means of this approach, its improvement is fostered. If not, the process will support its iterative transformation from predefined to adaptive. The Model Driven Engineering (MDE) methodology is used since it gives educational designers (teachers for this proposal) and software designers the ability to define, communicate, and test a solution while creating artifacts that become part of the overall solution. The Usage Tracking Language (UTL) has been developed to provide the actors of a TEL system (designers, tutors, learners, and analysts) with a dutiful tool to describe the observed uses of the descriptive pedagogical scenario and their semantics, including the definition of the observation needs and the means required for data acquisition. The structure of tracks and their transformations from raw data allows the calculation of indicators which supports the building of users’ models that will influence users’ decision making. Finally, a case study using the Hop3X environment for learning Java programming to apply this process is presented.