Abstract:

MOOCs constitute an important evolution of the environments of e-learning. Despite the success of this phenomenon, the implementations of MOOC content show that many obstacles remain. Moreover, the educational resources are rather simple (course, exercise, blog...) and are stored in a dedicated space. The provision of external pedagogical resources (Serious Game, Remote Laboratory...) becomes crucial. These complex resources are essential to a coherent pedagogical path and to ensure the practical application and the evaluation of the skills required by the learner. In this work, we propose an approach allowing the use of pedagogical resources deployed in MOOC platforms.
 
The production of resources requires consequent data-processing developments and the investment of time, money and human resources. It is fundamental to exploit them more than once and thus to be able to reuse and share them. In this context, the structuring of educational information via standards becomes crucial.

LOM is a standard that allows indexing pedagogical resources. This standard is considered complex. Moreover, LOM specifies only four levels of aggregation, which are rather general and vague. On the evaluation level, LOM did not specify information for the validation of the learner's skills.
The SCORM standard presents the aggregation of resources and not a sequence of activities, or any navigation from one to another and any communication with the MOOC. Moreover, it does not specify how a MOOC should use the various organization of the content.  Concerning SCORM, it is not possible to describe the assessment action, which will be realized with the aggregate contents. It results in a lack of tracking of the learner's activity,  that is though necessary for the evaluation of its competencies.

In order to illustrate our remarks, we present here a complex resource “remote laboratory”. A remote laboratory proposes a practical activity that is necessary to the learner's formation. It consists in a shareable resource among learners and it is composed of several resources deployed on real physical hardware reachable via remote platforms. This resource is time-constrained: a remote laboratory lasts a fixed duration with an accessibility constraint due to the shareable property. In the case of complex and evolving resources over the time, those standards do not propose any time constraints on the resource and do not present some mutual exclusion concerning a shareable critical resource.
 
We propose an integration model of a complex pedagogical resource in a MOOC platform. This model deals with static and dynamic aspects. The static elements are those that characterize the structure and the contextualization of educational resource. The dynamic components concern the services that the resource needs for its use.
               
In this paper, we proposed an approach to integrate complex resources in MOOC (ClarolineConnect). The current resources present very often an insufficiency in practical application and then a lack of evaluation of the relevant competencies acquired by the learner. In this context, we focused on the problem and we built a bundle allowing to deploy a remote laboratory resource. This resource is obviously complex: it has a reservation module of the different resources used and relies also on real hardware. These resources, digital and not, are deployed in distant platforms and invocated from ClarolineConnect via web services.

Keywords:

TEL, MOOC, complex resource, remote laboratory, web service, LOM, SCORM.