Abstract:

Knowledge, know-how, and interpersonal skills remain critical for each of us. This knowledge that creates, transforms, or develops our cognitive structure stems from different learning situations that it is helpful to distinguish. Defined as a set of conditions and circumstances likely to lead a learner to build knowledge, a learning situation can be formal or non-formal. The formal learning situations result from teaching and are linked to the learning process organized through specialized institutions such as universities. The non-formal situations relate to the learning activities undertaken by the learners outside of what has been planned in a course. These latter situations describe how the learner learns and highlight the uses of technology for learning, thus reflecting current learning realities. Despite their contrast in form, these situations are equally important for acquiring knowledge. For instance, in African universities, learners use digital social media in a course, highlighting non-formal learning situations. After formalizing such situations, we developed a semantic layer named SceNFOnto, a syncretic definition of the different entities interacting in a non-formal learning situation. This semantic layer allows the production of descriptive scenarios which reflect the intentionality "to learn" and which are the very object of the exploitation of non-formal learning situations through an educational, social network.

Furthermore, reusing these scenarios would consolidate the learning process through the didactic evaluation of the learning situations by using the events and traces of learning encountered in real situations to infer or verify hypotheses on the practical appropriation of knowledge. Then, evaluate the learners by analyzing all the traces collected and possibly comparing them with a predefined ideal model. Finally, setting up profiles makes it possible to personalize learning.

This article aims to present the SceNFOnto layer and to demonstrate its application by one of the many different descriptive scenarios that may arise from it.

By presenting the current offer in digital education about field practice with the case of two West African universities, the final document demonstrates the need to link the digital uses offered to learners in the formal institutional framework with those developed in extracurricular contexts through social media. It also defines the descriptive scenario to show its importance to the proposition before presenting the ontological model in question and its application to an example of a descriptive scenario.

Keywords:

Formal learning situations, Non-formal learning situations, Social media, Ontology, Descriptive scenario.