The communication and the collaboration in a multi-disciplinary team can be diminished due to the different specification tools and languages used by the diverse members of the team. The MODUWEB approach tackles this problem allowing the integration of different design perspectives through Model-Driven Development (MDD) techniques. Such integration is completely transparent to the users of the modeling languages, that is, the designers of the web-based educational systems, and in this way their productivity is not affected. This paper describes a prototype of a system which implements the MODUWEB approach to combine two domain specific languages dealing with different perspectives of the design of a Web-based educational system: IMS Learning Design for educational design and Labyrinth for web design.
The design of Web-based educational systems is a multi-disciplinary task that requires the contribution of both experts in educational systems and experts in web design. As a result of the different backgrounds and variety of languages used by the members of the team, the effectiveness of the communication and the collaboration in a multi-disciplinary team can be diminished, as reported in [1].
In [2] authors present MODUWEB, a solution to overcome this problem. The main contribution of MODUWEB is the integration through MDD techniques of different design perspectives, which remain independent from the point of view of each designer. The idea is to let each expert use the language of her domain of expertise to specify the perspective of the system she is concerned with and then integrate all these views to produce a unique design. The MODUWEB approach has been currently applied to combine two different modelling environments: one oriented towards educational designers and a second one oriented towards web designers.
In both cases, existing domain specific languages are used (IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) [3] for educational design and Labyrinth [4] for web design) so each expert can use the language she is proficient in. In this paper we describe a framework that implements the MODUWEB approach. The framework provides developers with client applications for modeling a web-based educational system using both IMS LD and Labyrinth languages. The IMS LD model of the system is automatically translated into Labyrinth notation and the consistency and integrity between the different perspectives is guaranteed through a validation module.
Although there exists different IMD LD Players implementations as Coppercore [5], SLED [6] or GRAIL[7], the use of the MODUWEB approach promotes the development of web applications that, rather than being generic execution environments, respond to the requirements of visualization, accessibility and usability of specific learning designs. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the architecture of the system. In section 3 and 4 the transformation process between the two design perspectives and the implementation of the validation module are depicted. An example of a system implemented following the MODUWEB approach is provided in section 5. Finally, some conclusions and current research lines are presented.
