Abstract:

In recent years, Rob Koper of the Open University of Nederland has developed a pedagogical meta model consists of a descriptive language that can describe any kind of teaching activity through a vocabulary of basic elements from which to derive the actions, roles , activities and in general all components of the study units. The language was called EML - Educational Modelling Language. This language was designed to extend the concept of Learning Object to integrate educational information and meta-knowledge in order to overcome the concept of "educational materials" and to encounter the concept of “study units”.
The EML language was taken as the basis for the development of IMS - LD (Instructional Management Systems - Learning Design) specification.
The IMS – LD specification provides the basic elements that have been identified as essential to describe learning / teaching processes: roles (learners, teachers, tutors etc.), activities (learning activities), environments (services and learning resources), method (play, act and role-parts). It allows to move from the design and portability of content to design and transferability of activity.
The adoption of descriptive standards has been slowed by difficulty of representation and implementation. Some projects were developed from IMS – LD specification. There has been interest in enabling the Learning Management System, such as Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment), to generate and run LD unit of learnings. Infact, Michael Klebl proposed a prototype which implements a subset of LD basic level in Moodle. However, most significant levels of IMS – LD specification were not implemented in Moodle. Some technologies support Moodle in this direction, such as LAMS (Learning Activity Management System).
This paper presents an analysis of the interoperability between LAMS, a Learning Design Management System, and Moodle, a Learning Content Management System, and how these systems are integrated.
The LAMS integration with Moodle takes care of SSO (Single Sign-On), and allows users to use all the advanced features provided by LAMS through the Moodle platform such as automatic management of groups, real-time monitoring of courses and the branching feature introduced in the last version, that give the possibility to the instructional designer to create branching in the learning process.
This paper presents the results of a case study based on two learning platforms, LAMS for the activity management and Moodle for the management of the learning process, emphasizing the common aspects and complementary one.

Keywords:

e-learning, Educational Modelling Language, Learning Design, Learning Content Management Systems.