Turning Recurrent Uses of E-learning Tools into Reusable Pedagogical Activities - A Meta-modeling Approach Applied to a Moodle Case-study

The pedagogical expressiveness of designed courses using Learning Management Systems (LMS) is highly dependent on the teachers’ expertise about how to use the LMS at their disposal. The GraphiT project aims to help teachers in focusing on the specification of pedagogically sound learning scenarios that can be technically executable for automatically setting-up the LMS. We propose to provide teachers with LMS-specific instructional design languages and editors. The LMS semantics has to be raised in order to enrich the pedagogical expressiveness of the produced models. This paper deals with the proposition of a specific LMS-centered approach for abstracting the LMS low-level parameterizations and turning them into higher-level pedagogical building blocks. We choose to present and illustrate our propositions about the Moodle LMS. We focus on the first abstraction level. It consists in identifying some pedagogical activities according to recurrent uses designers make by handling the Moodle activities.