Michail Boloudakis, Mary Katsamani, Symeon Retalis and Petros Georgiakakis.

1. CADMOS: A learning design tool for
Moodle courses
http://cosy.ds.unipi.gr/cadmos/
Michail Boloudakis, Mary Katsamani, Petros
Georgiakakis
Supervisor Prof. Symeon Retalis
University of Piraeus
Department of Digital Systems
Computer Supported Learning Engineering Laboratory
http://cosy.ds.unipi.gr

2. The Presentation in Brief …
 The lesson plan challenge
 The CADMOS tool
 Use case
 Limitations & future work

3. Learning Design (LD)
 LD is a planning and ordering of learning activities that takes place
in a unit of learning (Current research in learning design, Rob
Kopper)
 A “digital lesson plan”
 But not simply a narrative description – rather, it can “do” something
 A teacher may create a learning design for a simple activity, for a
course lasting one or a few hours, for a course lasting a few weeks
or even months or for a curriculum, meaning a whole year teaching
programme [Britain, 2004; Goodyear, 2005]
 A teacher has to specify for the LD:
 Learning Activities
 Orchestration of these activities (order, conditions, rules)
 Learning Objects related to these activities

4. The Lesson Plan Challenge
 A lesson plan should be sharable and re-usable
 A common, formal and “rich” design language should
be used
 Teachers as designers prefer to use graphical tools that
could guide them (e.g. WebCollage, Compendium,
LAMS) (Neumann and Oberhuemer, 2009)
 Teachers want to enact their lesson plans easily without
requiring technical skills (e.g. LAMS)

5. Course Design: Neuroscience
Spring 2012 Semester
http://contentbuilder.merlot.org/toolkit/html/snapshot.php?id=20982585214994

6. Main Idea of CADMOS
 Is the Separation of Concerns (SoC), an Established
Concept in Architecture & Web Engineering
 Objectives of SoC
 Use of Divide-and-Conquer Approach for addressing
complexity of a problem
 Ease of handling these smaller problems in relative
isolation
 Ease of solving these relatively isolated simpler
problems
The term separation of concerns was probably coined by Edsger W. Dijkstra in
his 1974 paper "On the role of scientific thought"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns

7. Separation of Concerns in CADMOS

8. Conceptual Model
Composite Simple
Activity Activity
Learning Resource
or Service

9. Flow Model

10. Flow Model with rules
Composite
structure of
activities

11. Advantages from the SoC idea
 Different Concerns: different design views & layers of
design interest
 Edit the conceptual model without changing anything
in the flow model (e.g. change the metadata or the
resources)
 Create several flow views keeping the same
conceptual model
 Step wise design approach
 Allows traceability in the design process
 Allows to focus on a specific view Concern-1 Concern-2
 Allows to reuse the design views
Concern-3 Concern-4

12. Challenges
 Teachers noted that needed more different types of
activities and resources to use in their designs
 Teachers said that needed more rules to use in the flow
model
 Teachers said that they needed to “run” their scenarios in
a real environment

13. Bridging the gap between
Lesson plan & Enactment

14. Moodle Preview & Export

15. CADMOS to Moodle Structural
Model

16. CADMOS to Moodle Resources/Activities
Mapping

17. Case Study
 17 volunteers organized from the Faculty of Primary
Education of the University of Athens & the Department
of Mathematics of the Technical Institute of Piraeus
 15 teachers
 9 primary school teachers
 6 high school teachers
 9 didn’t have experience in learning design
 8 had at least used one learning design tool

18. Phases of the Case Studies
 Each case was completed in two phases:
 Phase 1: presentation of the tool in the laboratory, the
students made in CADMOS a prescribed learning
design  3 hours
 Phase 2: the students made in CADMOS a prescribed
learning design that were given from us and a learning
design from their own teaching practice  1 week
 Finally they completed an on-line questionnaire

19. Evaluation
 The evaluation of Cadmos Tool was done by:
 Evaluating the learning designs that the students
submitted in phase 2, with a subject from their own
teaching practice, by using a rubric with criteria
 Collecting the data from the questionnaires that the
students answered

20. Statistics from Case Study 1/2
 94,11% of the participants declared that they can easily
understand the philosophy of the tool and the two
models
 94,12% claimed that the use of CADMOS is very simple
to use
 52,94% said that they like the tool a lot
 64,71% mentioned that were satisfied from the guidance
that the tool offers them
 76,47% of the participants claimed that the graphical
representation of a learning design in CADMOS is more
illustrative, easy to create and to understand than the
usual narrative form

21. Statistics from Case Study 2/2
 58,82% claimed that with CADMOS they could design
easily a course for Moodle
 64,70% of the participants stated that they could easily
understand how to design a Moodle on-line course using
CADMOS
 64,71% of them said that they agreed with the way the
Moodle elements had been mapped to CADMOS
conceptual elements.
 58,82% of the participants claimed that the way that the
course was represented in Moodle was in full
accordance with the two models of CADMOS design

22. Results from the Evaluation
of the LDs 1/2
 The participants were more efficient in the design of the
conceptual model rather the design of the flow model
 The majority of the teachers had lack of creativity in the
learning scenarios
 Teachers had difficulties in associating the proper
learning resources to the learning activities
 Teachers used active learning and collaboration in the
creation of the learning activities of their scenarios

23. Results from the Evaluation
of the LDs 2/2
 In general, from the observation of the research team
and the analysis of the submitted lesson plan,
participants were satisfied by the CADMOS and hugely
appreciate the fact that there is a tool that can help them
design and deploy a Moodle course.

24. Open Design issues
 Annotation types  Types of Moodle Resources &
Activities
 Match teachers’ semantics with Moodle semantics
 Phases  Moodle topics
 What about weekly format?
 Representation of rules
 How to represent rules that cannot be enacted in
Moodle?

25. Creating enriched document
based learning scripts

26. Export to Word – *.docx

27. CADMOS: Interoperability
CADMOS CADMOS models
Conceptual
CADMOS models Model IMS LD models
Moodle
IMS LD models
Flow Model Word Docx

28. Future Work 1/2
 CADMOS taxonomy needs validation by teachers and
experienced designers:
 To keep CADMOS’ taxonomy rather small but effective
 The mappings between learning design elements and
the Moodle’s elements needs further investigation

29. Future Work 2/2
 CADMOS should be able to import Moodle courses:
 To track down the actual enactment and be compared
to the originally designed learning script
Cadmos  Moodle  Cadmos

30. Our vision: the CADMOS virtual LD
community
 Switch CADMOS page to an online community
 41.76% Returning Visitor
 Access the online version of CADMOS tool
 Create, edit & preview lesson plans in a guided & graphical way
 deploy them in Moodle
 Download & share lesson plans as CADMOS or common docx files.
 Embed social media mechanisms
 Share, rate & comment lesson plans through Facebook & follow
colleagues through Twitter
 Interoperate with other teachers’ communities
 Moodle Lesson Plan community

31. Thank you!
http://cosy.ds.unipi.gr/cadmos/