IMS-CLD: A NEW SPECIFICATION FOR LEARNING
SCENARIOS IN COPES
Azeddine Chikh
Dept. of Information systems, King Saud University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Lamia Berkani
National Institute of ComputerScience, INI, Algiers, Algeria
Akila Sarirete
Dept. of Computer Sc., Effat College, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Keywords: CoPE, IMS-LD, IMS-CLD, Specification, Learning Scenario, Collaborative Learning.
Abstract: In the present work we focus on the problem of capitalization of techno-pedagogic knowledge, both tacit
and explicit in the domain of e-learning. We attempt to solve this problem within the framework of a CoPE
(Communities of Practice of E-learning) which is about considering a virtual space of exchange, sharing,
and resolution of problems encountered by the actors of the e-learning during all phases of an online
learning system life cycle. The purpose of this article is to propose a new specification for learning
scenarios in CoPEs, called IMS-CLD (Learning Design in CoPEs). This language is an extension of IMS-
LD (Learning Design) language, enriched with CoPE’s concepts in order to capture the richness of
interactions, which are inherent to collaborative activities and more particularly within CoPEs. IMS-CLD
aims at facilitating the communication between the LMS (Learning Management System) on one side and
the CoPE’s environment on the other side. After providing a detailed description of the elements of IMS-
CLD, we present a case study in order to depict their use through the specification of learning scenarios in a
given CoPE.
1 INTRODUCTION
“The Communities of Practice of E-learning”
(CoPEs) is considered as a subcategory of
Communities of
Practice (CoPs). This new concept,
which we have defined in a previous work (Chikh &
al., 2007), represents a virtual space for exchanging,
sharing, and resolving problems encountered by the
actors of the e-learning during all phases of an
online learning system life cycle. The advantages
culminate in the emergence of a collective techno-
pedagogic intelligence. Thus, the CoPE is
considered as a thinking space which aims to favor
practices of reuse and exchange among actors in
terms of techno-pedagogic knowledge and know-
how.
There is a strong relationship between CoPE and
LMS (Learning Management System). We
distinguish two exchange types : (i) the exchange
LMSÖCoPE, which aims particularly to support
discussions inside CoPEs with real problem
situations encountered in LMS, making the CoPE’s
space more active; and (ii) the exchange
CoPEÖLMS, which consists in testing the solutions
obtained in the CoPE’s space directly in LMS, prior
to reifying them in the CoPE memory.
The feasibility of exchanges LMSÙCoPE is
possible through formal modeling of learning
situations in both sides of the exchange. IMS-LD
(Learning Design) specification allows modeling
only the learning situations for LMS. Accordingly,
a new specification for learning situations within
CoPEs is more than necessary. Therefore, we
propose in this paper the IMS-CLD (Learning
Design in CoPEs) specification, which is essentially
inspired from IMS-LD.
422
Chikh A., Berkani L. and Sarirete A. (2008).
IMS-CLD: A NEW SPECIFICATION FOR LEARNING SCENARIOS IN COPES.
In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 422-427
DOI: 10.5220/0001527704220427
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

2 COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
OF E-LEARNING
The CoPE definition is obtained by the adaptation
and enrichment of the CoPs concept developed by
Lave and Wenger (1998). A CoPE is a group of
professionals in an e-learning environment who
gather, collaborate, and organize themselves face to
face and mostly virtually in order to:
 share information and techno-pedagogic
experiences related to the development and
use of online learning systems;
 exchange and cooperate in order to solve
collaboratively techno-pedagogic problems;
 learn from each other and develop
competencies in instructional engineering;
 build (improve and/or create) together techno-
pedagogic knowledge and model the best
practices to be followed in the realization of
the online learning system;
 promote the application of e-learning standards
such as: IMS-LD, IMS-LIP, IMS-LOM and so
forth;
 define terminology, glossary, or ontology
conciliating the various views and articulating
them around the above mentioned standards.
According to Pernin (2006), this is essential if
we are aiming at large-scale sharing and
improvement of the practices concerning
building activity scenarios.
The exchange inside the CoPE involves two
dimensions during the acquisition phase of an online
learning system life cycle: (1) The “Product”
dimension relative to the design components: roles,
activities, resources, services, tools, and properties,
etc.; (2) The “Process” dimension relative to the
instructional design approaches, methods,
techniques, and tools.
3 REUSING IMS-LD IN COPES
The IMS-LD specification (IMS Global Learning
Consortium, 2003) is a standardized learning design
language that was based on the work of Educational
Modeling Language (Koper, 2001) at the Open
University of the Netherlands. It makes the focus of
e-learning shift from emphasizing learning objects to
emphasizing learning activities (Tattersall, 2004).
IMS-LD aims at representing the 'learning design'
of 'units of learning' in a semantic, formal and
machine-interpretable way (Yu et al., 2005). A unit
of learning in IMS-LD is represented as a piece of
theater, composed of acts. Each act contains a
number of activities which are proposed to roles in
an environment with a set of services and resources.
Group and collaborative learning in IMS-LD has
been described by associating multiple people and/or
multiple roles to the same learning activity. This is
done through a service activity (Santos et al, 2004).
Hernàndez et al. (2004) have proposed an extension
of the IMS-LD service specification consisting of a
special type of service called groupservice, which
includes collaboration-related capabilities.
The learning situations in CoPEs are
characterized by their collaborative aspect and
particularly their informal character. The most
common situation types are: the problem situation,
the decision situation, and (3) the project situation.
A formal modeling of these learning situations is
necessary to make them machine interpretable.
However, the learning scenarios in CoPEs, being
interactive, aren’t a priori established by the
designers, but generated from free interactions of
members. We put forth three possible solutions of
formal modeling of learning scenarios in CoPEs.
The difference among them resides in reusing IMS-
LD or not.
Solution 1: creating a new language, completely
independent of IMS-LD. This solution assumes that
learning in CoPEs is entirely different from that in e-
learning. This hypothesis is very weak with regard
to the strong similarity between these two kinds of
learning, especially the collaborative learning in e-
learning.
Solution 2: merely reusing IMS-LD. This
solution presents some limits due to IMS-LD’s
incapacity to fit learning specificity in CoPEs.
Solution 3: extending IMS-LD in order to
include CoPEs’ particularities. This solution takes
advantage of IMS-LD semantic interoperability and
favors exchanges between CoPEs and LMS
platforms accordingly.
4 IMS-CLD SPECIFICATION
IMS-CLD extends IMS-LD by adding new elements
and enriching some existent ones. The objective is to
increase its expressing power in modeling learning
situations in CoPEs. Below the components of IMS-
CLD are presented.
1. The «C-role» component takes care of the
definition of roles in CoPEs. We distinguish four
generic roles:
IMS-CLD: A NEW SPECIFICATION FOR LEARNING SCENARIOS IN COPES
423

 support members, who contribute to the
continuous and effective CoPE function;
 learner members (experts or participants), who
contribute to the CoPE activities;
 visitor members, who are external CoPE
members with limited access rights;
 guest members, who are invited by other CoPE
members.
Figure 1 shows the C-role elements which are
specific to CoPEs.
Figure 1: Information model of « C-role ».
 «Participation» enables the «Server» and
«Client» to interact. For example, the server
can support the client by stating the problem
differently and giving some hints or directly
providing the answer;
 «Category» indicates an individual or a group
role;
 «Rights» defines the access rights of a role to
other services, resources, virtual spaces, and
activities;
 «Group’s position» shows the role importance
in the group: «Principal» or «Secondary»;
 «Profile» describes members’ profiles with
IMS-LIP (IMS Learner Information Package),
which we adapt to CoPEs: technical /
pedagogical qualifications; cognitive
characteristics such as intelligence, perception
and creativity; communication skills;
preferences, needs and objectives;
competencies (academic background,
professional experience); availability;
commitment degree; etc. Based on the
information gathered from these profile
details, a specific competency would emerge.
2. The «C-activity» component defines activities
in CoPEs which are classified into four activity-
types: «Analysis-activities», «Design-Activities»,
«Implementation-activities», and «Utilization-
activities». These activity-types correspond
respectively to the life cycle steps of an online
course.
Figure 2: Information model of « C-activity ».
Every activity is described with data that is either
already defined by IMS-LD or specific to CoPEs.
Figure 2 describes the elements that have been
added:
 «Approach» that indicates if the activity is
individual, collaborative or cooperative;
 «Context» that indicates, for example, that the
activity takes place in either an industrial
context or a school context;
 «Problem to solve» that can be used to index
activities for an eventual retrieval;
 «Constraints» that can be technical,
organizational, temporal, and so forth;
 «Result» that includes beneficiary, resolution
rate, dissemination means and delays;
 «Date» that indicates the start and end dates of
the activity (Mbala 2002);
 «Activity-type» that may be classified into
debate, analysis, validation, etc.
3. The «C-environment» component defines
where CoPE activities take place. We present below
the three elements which compose «C-
environment»: «C-service», «C-resource» and « C-
space».
a. «C-service»: in addition to the four basic
services predefined in IMS-LD, we adopt a
particular service called Groupservice proposed by
Hernández-Leo et al. (2004) as shown in figure 3.
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Figure 3: Information model of « C-service ».
Moreover, we have added three new elements:
 «Service type» that specifies the nature of the
required service: communication,
argumentation, validation, edition and
research aspects;
 «Service profile» that indicates the technical
characteristics: the capacity and limitations of
a given service, and information about
connexion and access;
 «Sub-service» that gives the possibility to
define more specialized services.
b. «C-resource » defines the resources used by a
CoPE. We propose the classification related to
activities’ types that were defined earlier: «Analysis-
resources», «Design-resources», «Implementation-
resources», and «Utilization-resources». The
resources generally represent either inputs or outputs
for a given activity. We associate with the resources
the following attributes:
 «Type» that could be technical, pedagogical,
mediatic, or didactic;
 «Source» that indicates the resources’ source;
 «Validation» that indicates if the resource has
been validated or not yet;
 «Category» that corresponds to the four
classes of resources defined previously.
c. «C-space» is related to a work space and helps
in organizing and performing activities. We propose
the classification corresponding to activities’ types
defined previously: «Analysis-space», «Design-
space», «Implementation-space» and «Utilization-
space». Every space type is composed of three sub-
spaces: «Problem solving sub-space», «Decision
sub-space», and «Project sub-space». In addition, we
foresee another space, « Free-space », that treats
general questions and can be divided into other sub-
spaces related to particular themes. The spaces will
be accessible according to the access rights.
4. The «C-method» component defines the
progress of the activities in a CoPE. We have
adopted the same information model of the
«Method» element of IMS-LD. However, we have
enriched the «Play type» of the “Play” element.
Indeed, we distinguish in CoPEs three types of plays
«Problem based learning», «Decision support» and
«Project Management», corresponding to the three
types of learning situations: problem situation,
decision situation, and project situation respectively.
We propose for every type of play a certain number
of acts:
a. Play of type «Problem based learning» which
aims at finding solutions to problems encountered in
the acquisition and utilization phases of an online
course. Its learning objectives are:
 to favor transfer and knowledge integration;
 to make this knowledge operational and to
adapt it to new situations;
 to acquire skills (analysis, synthesis, critical
thinking, group work);
 to create a collective intelligence and a shared
vision of resolution.
Figure 4: Play of type «Problem based learning».
Figure 4 above presents a play of type «Problem
based learning» in seven steps considered as acts.
This process is triggered by the problem at input. It
is about finding one or many satisfactory solutions.
The knowledge used in this process can be either
explicit (CoPE memory) or tacit (members
competencies). This resolution takes advantage of
the CoPE resources (tacit and explicit) and uses both
individual and collaborative approaches.
b. Play of type «Decision support» which
addresses the choice among many alternatives
during the acquisition phase of an online course. For
example: which type of learning situation to select in
a specific module of a given course or which role to
select to assure a moderation activity in a group
(tutor/learner-moderator).
The play of type «Decision support» is based on
the decision model of reference of Simon (1977).
This model is structured in four phases:
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425

 A phase of «Intelligence» that aims in gathering
and organizing necessary information;
 A phase of «design» that aims in constructing
alternatives and deducing their consequences;
 A phase of « choice » that aims in evaluating
the consequences of the different alternatives,
selecting the most favorable alternative, and
then confirm the conditions of that
alternative;
 A phase of «Review» that checks if the real
consequences of the selected alternative are
conform to decision maker’s expectations
(feedback).
c. Play of type «Project management»: a learning
system is characterized by three models: a
knowledge model to describe learning objects, a
pedagogic model to specify the processes or learning
scenarios, and the mediatic model to define the
pedagogic materials and the technologic
infrastructures as learning support (Paquette, 1997).
The proposed play of type
«Project management» is based on the engineering
process of MISA method (Paquette, 1997). This play
of type is structured in three levels: phases, steps and
activities. The engineering process is composed of
five phases which will be considered as acts:
 to accomplish the analysis and the preliminary
design;
 to elaborate the architecture of a learning
system;
 to design pedagogical materials;
 to realize and validate materials;
 to prepare the setting of the learning system.
5 CASE STUDY
This case study concerns a CoPE developed and
done within the framework of the project of distance
education CoseLearn “Coopération Suisse en
matière de eLearning” that was initiated by
QualiLearning company which consists in
promoting e-learning in a number of French-
speaking countries in Africa (www.coselearn.org).
The main aim of this program is to promote e-
learning by progressively implementing a Virtual
Campus in more than 50 partner universities.
CoseLearn program leads to the professional
diploma of “Master International En e-
Learning” (MIEL) (International Master in e-
Learning).
The CoPE is made up of principal actors of the
project (professors, tutors, and administrators) and
master candidates (university teachers and computer
centre engineers). The learning situation
encountered within the framework of this CoPE
covers the three types of learning situations: problem
situations, decision situations, and project situations.
The problem situations consist in finding
answers to the various questions encountered by the
candidates during all their training and instruction,
namely during the duties stated in various subjects
as well as during the final project. The decision
situations identify essentially the possible
alternatives for the design and development. The
criteria and/or the arguments necessary to the
selection are also identified. Finally, the project
situations address the exchange of the practices.
These practices will be deducted using a viable
know-how in terms of construction of the online
education courses (best practices).
In case of the problem-situations type, Moodle is
used as a technical environment and is plays the role
of an LMS and a CoPE. Let’s consider, for example,
a question asked by a learner member: How to write
a Java applet to allow part of an online course on
LMS Moodle to communicate with a simulation
software in order to automatically capture the
simulations’ results?
The answer to this question requires the
collaboration of the learner members of the CoPE
(master candidates) within the framework of a play
of type «problem based learning». Here is some
supplementary information about this learning
situation:
 The learner-members have a techno-
pedagogical qualification;
 Participation of support-members: moderator,
manager and reporter is required;
 The collaboration takes place in the «Problem-
solving sub-space» of the «Design-space».
The collaboration takes the form of discussion
of different alternatives, offered by Java and
related to applets. A discussion is also done
about the way Moodle is communicating with
the simulator;
 The CoPE memory contains, among others,
interesting resources on Java applets, Moodle,
and the simulator;
 The results of this collaboration will be saved in
the CoPE memory.
An XML code has been generated with IMS-
CLD schema. In this scenario, two sub-roles of
learner-member role were created: «Pedagogical
participant» and «Technical Participant». Other sub-
roles were created such as: «Moderator», «Reporter»
and «Manager» of support-member role. Since the
problem to solve is part of the design step, the
activity type «Design-activity» was used. An
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«Activity-structure» was created to group activities
that have to be executed sequentially such as the
“clarification of terms” activity and the “definition
of the objectives” activity. Resources of various
types have been used. The play is composed of
seven acts matching the seven steps of resolution
defined previously. Each act can be composed of
two role-parts. The first one relate to the activities
done by the learner members. While the second one
is about the support activities done by the support
members.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The present paper constitutes a logic succeeding of
our research work (Chikh & al., 2007) which goal is
the capitalization of techno-pedagogic knowledge,
tacit or explicit, in terms of e-learning within the
context of CoPEs. We have proposed a new
specification language of learning scenarios within a
CoPE, baptized IMS-CLD. This last extends IMS-
LD and favours exchange between the technical
environment of CoPEs in one side and LMS systems
in the other side. We have also defined three types of
plays: «Problem based learning», «Decision
support», and «Project management». Finally, we
have achieved a case study, where we have modeled
a problem situation in a CoPE, created within a
framework of the “Coselearn” training project in e-
learning. We foresee in a near future to validate this
new language with other learning situation-types and
implement an editor and a player for this language
using respectively «Reload Learning Design
Editor» and «Reload Learning Design Player» for
IMS-LD.
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