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Designing a Moodle course with theCADMOS learning design toolMaria Katsamani a , Symeon Retalis a & Michail Boloudakis aa Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Athens,

GreeceVersion of record first published: 04 Dec 2012.

To cite this article: Maria Katsamani , Symeon Retalis & Michail Boloudakis (2012): Designinga Moodle course with the CADMOS learning design tool, Educational Media International, 49:4,317-331

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Designing a Moodle course with the CADMOS learning designtool

Maria Katsamani*, Symeon Retalis and Michail Boloudakis

Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Athens, Greece

( Received 26 September 2012; nal version received 27 October 2012 )

CADMOS is a graphical learning design (LD) authoring tool that helps ateacher design a unit of learning in two layers: (i) the conceptual layer, whichseems like a concept map and contains the learning activities with their associ-ated learning resources and (ii) the ow layer, which contains the orchestrationof these activities. One of CADMOS main innovative features is that it can bridge the gap between the design of a unit of learning and its enactment intoMoodle. This paper presents how one can create a LD using CADMOS anddeploy it into Moodle. Also, the paper shows the ndings from a case studywhich was organized in order to evaluate the usability of the tool, its pedagogi-cal exibility and the usefulness of its innovative feature of deploying a LD intoMoodle. CADMOS seems to be an easy-to-use tool, which offers guidance and

exibility during the design process.

Keywords: CADMOS; LD tool; Moodle

MotivationThe learning design (LD) process, normally, involves a number of steps such as:the speci cation of the learning activities needs to be performed by human actors(e.g. learners and tutors) in order to achieve the learning objectives, the orchestra-tion of the learning activities, i.e. the sequence of the speci ed learning activities aswell as the identi cation of the learning resources and services that need to be usedin order to support the learning activities (Koper, 2005). The output of this processcan be called LD or design of a unit of learning or lesson plan or learning script.Since this process is iterative, learning designers, mostly teachers, need to easilymodify, update or enhance their designs in order to achieve the required level of learning effectiveness (Tattersall et al., 2005).

Teachers are used to create LDs in a narrative format, but such designs do not use a standard template and so is dif cult to be disseminated and reused. As Koper says, (Koper, 2005), to enable learning designers to search for, share and reuse LDmethods, a standard notation must be available and used . This is why IMS-LDspeci cation (IMS Global Consortium, 2003) appeared and became the commonlanguage among the designers (Specht & Burgos, 2007). However, since it was dif-

cult for the teachers to write XML les from scratch, the rst generation of form- based LD authoring tools had been proposed. The next generation of LD authoring

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Educational Media International Vol. 49, No. 4, December 2012, 317 331

ISSN 0952-3987 print/ISSN 1469-5790 online 2012 International Council for Educational Media

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523987.2012.745771http://www.tandfonline.com

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tools simpli ed the learning designer s tasks by providing drag and drop featuresfor specifying and orchestrating LD components, i.e. activities and resources(Grif ths, Blat, Garcia, Vogten, & Kwong, 2005).

Teachers, however, not only want to be able to design a unit of learning, but also to run it in a real environment. Thus, apart from the LD editors that help inthe creation of the design of a unit of learning, LD players had emerged that offer asimulation environment for the execution of a LD as well as LD engines that are real learning environments where a LD can be deployed and enacted (Berggrenet al., 2005).

Reload and Recourse (Milligan, Beauvoir, & Sharples, 2005) are both form- based editors and LD players that fully comply with the IMS-LD standard. Never-theless, the designer must be an expert in the speci cation in order to succeed increating a LD. Neumann and Oberhuemer (2009) found that these tools are not popular among teachers who tend to prefer LD tools with a simple and graphicalinterface. MOT+ (Paquette, Lonard, & Lundgren-Cayrol, 2011) is a graphical LDeditor that conforms to the IMS-LD speci cation, thus allowing the teachers toexport their designs as IMS-LD packages and then enact them in any IMS-LD player (e.g. Recourse and Reload). However, it is based on a complex underlyinggraphical knowledge modelling language which makes it inappropriate for novicelearning designers and teachers. OpenGlm (Derntl, Neumann, & Oberhuemer,2011), ASK-LDT (Sampson, Karampiperis, & Zervas, 2005), Collage (Hernandez-Leo et al., 2006) and its successor WebCollage follow the IMS-LD speci cation, provide guidance via the concept of templates and/or LD patterns, but still for add-ing complex rules they use forms.

On the contrary, Compendium (Conole, 2008b) and LAMS (Dalziel, 2007) that

use a visual interface and sequences of chronologically ordered activities, linked tocorresponding resources, are not IMS-LD compliant. Furthermore, LAMS, which isthe most popular LD tool at the moment, provides an execution environment apart from a design environment. Thus, teachers with basic computing skills and noknowledge of the IMS-LD speci cation can quickly create their own designs andeasily enact them using a proprietary learning platform.

In fact, nowadays the majority of the teachers use learning management systems(LMS) like Moodle and Blackboard in order to manage and run their onlinecourses. Until now none of the above mentioned LD authoring tools allow teachersto design their course and automatically create it as a Moodle course. The GSICresearch group having this in mind proposed the Glue-PS (Prieto et al., 2011), atool that can take a design that has been generated in WebCollage and enact it intoMoodle. But Glue-Ps is not a LD authoring tool.

Thus, the goal of this paper is to show how the CADMOS LD authoring toolcan aid in bridging the gap between the creation of a LD and its deployment inMoodle LMS. Bridging the gap between design and enactment of an online courseis very important (Prieto, Asensio-Prez, Dimitriadis, Gmez-Snchez, & Muoz-Cristbal, 2011) and CADMOS is the only LD authoring tool that does so at themoment. CADMOS is based on speci c design principles: (i) it should be a simpletool with graphical notation that should offer guidance to a teacher through thewhole design process, (ii) it should allow teachers to design in layers thus givingthem the possibility to focus on the appropriate speci cities of a lesson plan e.g.orchestration of learning activities, addition of rules, linking learning activities andlearning resources and to view a LD from different perspectives, (iii) embody

318 M. Katsamani et al.

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design patterns in order to facilitate the easy construction of a LD based on goodlearning practices and (iv) give teachers the possibility to enact a design in an LMSlike Moodle (Katsamani & Retalis, 2011).

In the following sections of the paper, rst we present the philosophy of the toolthrough an example and then we discuss the ndings from an evaluation study.Finally we close with some conclusions and the future work.

CADMOS design method via an exampleOverviewCADMOS is an IMS-LD level A & B compliant graphical LD tool addressedto novice learning designers, i.e. practitioners/teachers with basic computer skillsand knowledge of learning standards (Katsamani & Retalis, 2011). CADMOSguides a practitioner to design a learning script in layers (see Figure 1): rst by

specifying the learners and teachers activities and the associated learningresources and services required thus creating a learning activity conceptualmodel, and then by orchestrating the activities per human actor and adding rulesand constraints using the metaphor of swim lanes which are all depicted in thelearning activity ow model. Thus, not only can a practitioner determine inwhich order the students should perform the activities but also to specify condi-tions, preconditions or rules that will be associated to these activities, e.g. a stu-dent must score at least 60% in a test activity before proceeding to thefollowing activity.

The output of the LD process using CADMOS can have three forms: (i) a LD

codi ed in its own format in order to be reused and modi ed at some point later on; (ii) a LD package that conforms to the IMS-LD level A & B speci cation; and(iii) a package for Moodle which could be uploaded onto a Moodle server and usedfor restoring it as a Moodle course.

CADMOS also allows a designer to reuse existing LDs that conform to IMS-LD level A & B speci cation. However, the most innovative feature of CADMOSis that it tries to bridge the gap between the design of a learning script and itsdeployment into Moodle. It enables a learning designer to export the learning script as a Moodle package thus allowing its enactment in the Moodle learning platform.Thus, it can become a user-friendly LD tool for Moodle courses.

Figure 1. CADMOS learning design process.

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Creating a learning script for Moodle with CADMOSStarting the design of a course, the practitioner chooses if s/he wants to create anew design from the beginning or to use one of the available and prede ned learn-ing strategies i.e. TPS, Jigsaw, Pyramid and POE. If s/he decides to use a learning

strategy then the tool loads automatically the conceptual and the

ow model of thespeci c strategy and the practitioner can edit the models e.g. change the names andedit the metadata of the activities and the resources, add rules and comments. If s/ he decides to create a new design then s/he must de ne the title, the description,the goals, any prerequisites and the roles of the course before getting into thedesign area. Then the practitioner creates the conceptual model by dragging anddropping activities and resources into the canvas. The designer creates a concept map, by connecting each activity with the corresponding resource/s and s/he de nesthe metadata of the activities and the resources. When the conceptual model isready, the practitioner chooses to move to the ow model which is created automat-ically by the tool. CADMOS creates different swim lanes, each one for every roleof the course and puts the activities in each lane the one after the other in a verticalaxis, as these have been put in the conceptual model from left to the right. Thenthe designer has to move the activities in the vertical axis in order to show their chronological sequence and s/he may add rules and comments in the ow model.Finally, the designer may choose to save the design as a .cdm le or create a Moo-dle preview of the scenario. CADMOS shows in a different screen how the coursewill be build in Moodle if the designer chooses to create the export package. If s/hewants s/he can go back in CADMOS models and edit them in order to create a dif-ferent Moodle course. Finally s/he can choose to export the Moodle package, whichin the following can be restored in the LMS.

Figure 2. The conceptual model of the Filling Out Income Tax Forms course.


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An exampleFigures 2 4 show screenshots of CADMOS learning activity conceptual model,learning activity ow model and the Moodle preview of a learning script entitled

Figure 3. The ow model of the Filling Out Income Tax Forms course.


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Filling Out Income Tax Forms . This course teaches adults how to ll out their own tax forms in order to arrange their own nancial matters.

At rst, the teacher explains to the students the advantages of lling out their own tax forms and presents some theory about tax terminology. Then the learnersstudy the instructional guide, given by the Ministry of Finance, and watch videosabout lling out tax forms. In the following, each learner does an exercise ingoogledocs, practising with tax forms. The teacher corrects the exercises givingfeedback to the learners. If each learner has a score at least 60% in the exercise,watches a video-tutorial about a tax software and practises with it. Finally, the tea-cher evaluates this practice and gives some feedback through a forum.

We created two composite learning activities and

ve simple learning activitiesin this scenario:

Composite activity 1

Learning Activity 1 : The teacher explains to the learners the advantages of calculatingtheir own taxes. (type theory)

Learning Activity 2 : The teacher reviews tax terminology with learners. (type theory)

Composite activity 2 Learning Activity 3 : Each learner studies the rst part of the instructional guide given by the Ministry of Finance. (type theory)

Figure 4. Preview of the Filling Out Income Tax Forms course as it will be deployedinto Moodle.


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Learning Activity 4 : Each learner studies videos with examples. (type example)

Learning Activity 5 : Each learner does an exercise in googledocs. (type assessment)

Learning Activity 6 : The teacher corrects the exercises and sends feedback. (type feedback)

Learning Activity 7 : Each learner studies a tax software. (type theory)

Learning Activity 8 : Each learner practices with the tax software with speci c examples. (type simulation-modeling)

Learning Activity 9 : The teacher evaluates and sends feedback in a forum. (typeassessment)

Figure 2 shows the conceptual model of the learning scenario Filling Out Income Tax Forms . For each simple activity, we de ne metadata (title, description,learning goal, prerequisite, type and role), which are not shown in the gures. Spec-ifying the types of the activities, gives the opportunity to the designer to get anoverall idea of the nature of the LD (e.g. more emphasis is given on theory or stu-dents have to do a lot of assessment and no collaboration, and so on) by clickingon the Statistics button of the tool.

As we can see in Figure 2, every simple activity is linked to a resource. For every resource we also de ne metadata (title, author, description, type, copyright and resource le), which are not shown in the gures. In the suggested scenario wede ne the following type of resources, as shown in Table 1.

Figure 3 shows the ow model of the scenario. In this model, we see two differ-ent swim lanes, one for each role i.e. student and teacher. The activities are set inthe vertical axis, according to their chronological order. The model is divided intothree different phases: Phase 1: The scope of the lesson, Phase 2: Study and exer-cise Phase and Phase 3: Familiarize with tax software. The activities that aregrouped inside a rectangular show that they belong in the same composite activity,as it was described in the conceptual model. Also the Study the instructionalguide activity has a user-choice rule, which speci es that each student decideswhen this activity is completed and the Do an exercise in googledocs activity hasa time-limit rule which speci es that this activity will end after 1 h and 30 min.

Table 1. Mapping between activities and resources types in the scenario.

Activity Type of resource

1. Hypertext 2. Hypertext 3. Hypertext 4. Video5. Hypertext 6. Hypertext

7. Video8. Hypertext 9. Forum


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After the Do an exercise in googledocs activity there is a condition rule. Theteacher corrects the exercise of each student and if the score is less than 60%, thestudent must study the theory and the examples again otherwise s/he goes on withthe following activity.

Figure 4 shows the Moodle preview function of CADMOS tool. With this func-tion CADMOS converts the learning script into a Moodle course ready to bedeployed by converting CADMOS tasks/activities to Moodle resources/activities,CADMOS phases to Moodle topics etc. according to a mapping schema that isexplained in Figure 5. The mapping schema between the CADMOS resources

types and the Moodle course s resources/activities is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 5. CADMOS to Moodle structural model.

Figure 6. Mapping between CADMOS resources and Moodle resources/activities.


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The learning script is now ready to be exported as a Moodle course and bedeployed in a Moodle platform for enactment. The exported le is Moodle course backup le (.mbz) and can be imported in Moodle through the course restoration process. The deployed Moodle course will allow teachers to evaluate their learningscripts during the educational process and make adjustments if needed directly inMoodle or in CADMOS (Table 2).

CADMOS evaluation Evaluation goals

In order to test CADMOS tool, we organized an evaluation case study focusing onthe following main issues:

Is it possible for practitioners with basic computer skills and who are not experts in LD, to learn quickly and with no much effort how to use CAD-MOS tool? Is CADMOS interface attractive with simple notation?

Do practitioners think that the CADMOS supported design method gives them pedagogical exibility? Is it possible to change only the learning resourcesand leaving intact the learning activities or change only the learning ow of the activities without changing the group of the activities/resources or evencreate several ows of learning activities from a speci c set of them?

Does CADMOS guide practitioners through the whole design process? Canthey edit the LD from different perspectives?

Do practitioners believe that CADMOS is suitable for designing a unit of learning and enacting it into Moodle LMS?

These issues have been investigated by using qualitative and quantitative data.Speci cally the research group presented during a laboratory hands-on session theuse of CADMOS tool to teachers who were novice in LD and received rst impres-sions and feedback comments. Then teachers were asked to voluntarily create withCADMOS a design of a unit of learning, submit it within a week and nally

answer an online questionnaire. Below, the outcomes from analyzing data from thehands-on session, the submitted LDs and the answers to the questionnaire are presented.

Table 2. Mapping between resources types in CADMOS and in Moodle.

Activity Type of resource Moodle resource

1. Hypertext File resource2. Hypertext Url resource3. Hypertext File resource4. Video Url resource5. Hypertext Url resource6. Hypertext Url resource7. Video Url resource8. Hypertext Url resource9. Forum Forum


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ParticipantsThe participants involved in this study, were students of M.Sc. programme, whichis being organized by the Faculty of Primary Education of the University of Athensin collaboration with the Department of Mathematics of the Technical Institute of

Piraeus in Greece, during the spring semester of 2012. Thirty MSc students

all of them are teachers in public or private schools attended a hands-on session about CADMOS tool and afterwards were asked to participate voluntarily in the following phase of the study which required the submission of a LD for the needs of this casestudy. Seventeen of them submitted LDs and answered to an online questionnaire.All students had basic computer skills and little or no knowledge in LD. Studentswho did not complete the second phase claimed that they had heavy workload. Nine of students didnot have any experience in LD, while the rest of them (i.e. sixstudents) had used some knowledge of course authoring tools like LCDS, Cours-eLab and QuickLesson.

Evaluation processBoth qualitative and quantitative data were gathered during an evaluation processthat was organized in two phases:

Phase 1 : During this phase, the philosophy of the CADMOS design method, aswell as the functionality of the tool were explained during a hands-on session.Thirty students were called to create a lesson plan using CADMOS which wasgiven in a narrative format. The lesson plan was about a topic of environmentaleducation in high school and it is suggested by the Greek Pedagogical Institute.This phase lasted almost three hours and the research group made observationsabout the students usage of the tool and wrote down the students questions andtheir rst reactions.

Phase 2 : During this phase which was not compulsory, students were given theCADMOS tool v.1.9 and another prescribed lesson plan in a narrative format takenfrom the curriculum of history of the last grade of primary school (also a suggestion by the Greek Pedagogical Institute). They were asked to submit the graphical ver-sion of the lesson plan as well as its deployment as a Moodle course. The lesson plan concerned the historic facts about Alexander the Great which was familiar toall participants. Participants were asked to design this lesson plan using CADMOSand deploy it as a Moodle course. The duration of this phase was one week. During

this week participants could pose questions or make comments about the softwarevia a web forum. The research group examined the submitted lesson plans createdwith CADMOS and analyzed their answers to an online questionnaire.

The online questionnaire contained closed-type questions that were related to (i)the usability of the CADMOS tool, (ii) the pedagogical exibility of CADMOSdesign method and (iii) the suitability of CADMOS to enact a LD as a Moodle course.Also, it contained opened-type questions that allowed participants to express them-selves about the CADMOS tool, and the easiness of deploying a LD into Moodle

ResultsThe rst goal of the study was to evaluate the usability of CADMOS as a LD author-ing tool. Questions 3 15 of the questionnaire aimed to record if the participants were


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satis ed by the tool in general, if they had dif culties in learning how to use the tool,if the notation of the tool was simple to understand and if the interface of the tool wasfriendly enough to help them represent easily their lesson plans in a graphical format.The results were positive. About 52.94% of the participants seemed to be highly satis-

ed from the tool, while 94.12% of them declared that CADMOS is very simple touse. The observations of the research group during the laboratory Phase 1, veri edthe users answers as they had been able to design without having signi cant dif cul-ties after a rst quick demonstration of the tool. Also, 76.47% claimed that the graph-ical representation of a LD in CADMOS is more illustrative, easy to create and tounderstand than the usual narrative format and 82.36% of them said that they couldrepresent the prescribed LD in CADMOS easily. These answers are con rmed by thefact that the participants succeeded in creating and delivering well-structured designs,within only one week, although they had no or few experience in LD. About 88.24%of the participants found the notation of the tool adequate and 64.7% of them men-tioned that the user interface was friendly. In the opened-type questions, the majorityof them said that they would prefer a bigger design area in order to have a better representation of learning scripts with a lot of activities.

Questions 16 28 aimed to evaluate the pedagogical exibility of the CADMOSdesign method and the layered design approach that CADMOS supports. Themajority of the students (76.47%) argued that splitting the LD process into the crea-tion of the conceptual and the ow model helped them design in a methodical andstructured way and 58.82% of them said that CADMOS method helps a teacher todesign a complete lesson. The evaluation of the delivered LDs, proves this fact, asmost of the scenarios were fully described regarding the metadata i.e. title, descrip-tion, learning goals, prerequisites, actors, resources and rules. Both the creation of a

conceptual and a ow model was simple according to the participants

opinions(88.24%). Also, 70.59% of the participants said that this method offers guidance inLD, while all of them argued that the two models give exibility to the designer who can focus in each view. The majority of the students appreciated the fact that they could edit each of the models separately and speci cally found useful the abil-ity to use the same group of learning activities in the conceptual model in order to produce different ow models (88.24%) and the ability to use the same group of activities in the conceptual model, but connecting them with different learningresources (94.12%). These characteristics seem to be very important because theywill allow reusability in the LDs. Regarding the conceptual model, the studentscommented that they wanted to be able to match an activity with more than onelearning goals and they criticized the limited number of different types of tasks andresources. On the other hand, they seemed to be satis ed from the ow model.

Questions 29 34 evaluated the main innovative feature of CADMOS, i.e. thedeployment of a LD in Moodle. The majority of the participants (58.82%) said that with CADMOS they could easily design a course for Moodle and 64.70% of themstated that they could easily understand how to design a Moodle online courseusing CADMOS. Also 64.71% of the participants agreed with the way the Moodleelements had been mapped to CADMOS conceptual elements. Very important remark is that 58.82% of the participants claimed that the representation of thecourse in Moodle was in full accordance with the two models.

The participants made useful comments in the opened-type questions 34 37, aswell. They appreciated the fact that a non-expert in LD can learn easily how to usethe tool and that the two different views (conceptual and ow model) of the design


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enable reusability of the scenarios. However, they noted some software bugs andthe lack of software features like undo, copy & paste. These remarks will be takeninto consideration for the next version of the tool.

Conclusions and future plansThis paper presents CADMOS which in its current version (version 1.9) is a stable,user-friendly LD tool with a simple notation and an intuitive user-interface that doesnot demand speci c computer skills. Sodhi, Miao, Brouns, and Koper (2007) arguethat:

the emphasis should be on enabling the non-expert authors to express the LD in con-cepts presented in non-colloquial terms distant from the spec and closer to their work-ing vocabulary. ( representation )

In order to bridge the gap between the technologies for learning and their actualuse in practice (Conole, 2008a). CADMOS seems to support this idea. It is aneasy-to-use tool that offers guidance and this feature makes it attractive even toteachers who are not experts in LD. As several researchers note (Conole, Mundin,& Galley, 2012; Laurillard, 2008; Sodhi et al., 2007) guidance is needed in order to streamline the authoring process . Also with CADMOS, the design is created intwo different layers, while the practitioners have the possibility to examine tasksfrom different perspectives; at rst they describe the tasks and the correspondingresources and then they think about their orchestration (Katsamani & Retalis, 2011).The idea of designing in layers has been proposed before (Caeiro-Rodrguez, 2008)and it was used in the implementation of PoEML LD language. However, CAD-MOS approach is much simpler. It proposes only two layers in contrast to the PoE-ML which proposes six.

Furthermore, the idea of creating a concept map for specifying the learningactivities at the conceptual model was appreciated by the teachers. Concept mapping graphical representation is popular among teachers and helps in teachers men-tal modelling of internal representations and their possible evolutions (Cabellero,Moreira, & Rodriguez, 2008). CADMOS also supports the concept of swim lanesfor the orchestration of the learning activities at the ow model. This is a well-accepted notation by the teachers that Compendium uses it as well (Conole, 2012).

CADMOS is also based on a formal metamodel. This allows it to be compatibleto the IMS-LD speci cation, i.e. produces designs compatible to IMS-LD level A& B. So designs can be imported in tools like Reload or Recourse for beingenacted. It further allows a teacher to import IMS-LD level A LDs and changethem using CADMOS graphical representation. These are important features assharing and reusing seem to be very important issues among the teachers commu-nity (Koper, 2005; Sodhi et al., 2007). Last but not least, a design of a unit of learning created by CADMOS can be enacted simply and quickly in Moodle, whichis the most popular learning management system. CADMOS is the only LD author-ing tool that does so.

However, there are several issues that need to be further explored when using

CADMOS as a LD authoring tool. The experience of the case study in the labora-tory showed that although the users seemed to familiarize very quickly with thetool, they made some remarks mostly about the metadata schemata embedded in


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the tool, since they did not seem to cover all their needs even for simple and short-term units of learning. For example, although in its current implementation CAD-MOS offers a speci c taxonomy for describing the learning and support activities,it is de nitely smaller than other taxonomies such as the DialogPlus (Bailey, Zalfan,Davis, Fill, & Conole, 2006). Still, validation by teachers and experienced designersis needed in order to make sure that all activities can be appropriately characterizedkeeping CADMOS taxonomy rather small. The nal version of CADMOS taxon-omy for characterizing learning activities will try to consider all aspects and factorsinvolved in developing a learning activity, from the pedagogical context in whichthe activity occurs through to the nature and types of tasks undertaken by the lear-ner as suggested in (Bailey et al., 2006). The same concern applied to the metadatadescription of a learning resource or service.

Moreover, using CADMOS as a LD authoring tool for Moodle courses is quitechallenging. A teacher might create a LD in CADMOS that might have adaptationrules which Moodle cannot support such as the option to change the order of exe-cution of the learning activities in a composite activity from sequence to free selec-tion. Additionally, CADMOS should make sure that the mappings between its LDelements and the Moodle s elements are correct and comprehensible from bothsemantic and functionality point of view. Such case is the phases element. In itscurrent implementation, CADMOS suggests that each phase is mapped to a topic

element in Moodle. However, Moodle offers another way of structuring an onlinecourse which is the weekly structure. Mapping a phase to a week is feasible but also a bit tricky since CADMOS allows a designer to assign time limits to eachlearning task. So, weekly structure by default imposes a time limit to each learn-ing activity, which might not be what a designer had originally in mind.

Concluding, further experimentation with teachers, learning designers and designexperts is needed in order to make CADMOS a very usable LD authoring tool that meets their needs. The immediate plan is to release the revised version of the CAD-MOS tool to the Moodle community and ask users to give feedback.

AcknowledgementsSpecial thanks to the ITisART.com.gr of cial Moodle partner company for the valuabletechnical advices and support as well as to Mr Aris Polyzos and the MSc students from thedepartment of TEI Piraeus and the University of Piraeus who participated to this evaluationcase study as well as to other studies, for the discussions about the mapping of the CADMOSand Moodle elements as well as for giving us inspiration for the scenario of the presented case

study. CADMOS can be downloaded from the website: http://cosy.ds.unipi.gr/cadmos .

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