XML-BASED COURSE SYLLABI

An Electronic Implementation of the CDIO Syllabus

Ricardo Camarero, Cl´ement Fortin, Gregory Huet

D´epartement de G´enie m´ecanique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montr´eal, Montr´eal, Canada

Jacques Raynauld, Olivier Gerb´e

Chair for Teaching and Learning in Management Education, HEC, Montr´eal, Canada

Keywords:

XML, Syllabus, CDIO, Open courseware, LMS, Learning objectives.

Abstract:

A syllabus forms the structure of a course (or program) offering and is used to assemble its constituents.

Course websites and LMS’s, also contain similar information, and in some sense, are quite similar to course

outlines or syllabi, and replicate some of the information that can also be found in administrative websites

of universities. From a system perspective, this duplication and dispersion of information can be a source of

confusion and hinder the set-up of an integrated workﬂow approach to manage all the course information for

visualisation or reporting purposes.

Course outlines or syllabi, whatever the support used for distribution, are essentially ”paper” documents that

are most often created using word processors or limited web forms in course management systems. Currently,

there is no accepted standard format for representing syllabi that could facilitate automatic production or

processing of their contents.

In this paper, we present a model for a specialized tool to create, edit and publish course syllabi that can

be used alongside LMS’s and other administrative environments. The proposed prototype is based on XML

to semantically tag the set of detailed elements of the CDIO Syllabus towards a complete and consistent

implementation of an electronic syllabus. The objective is to cast the programs and course outlines into a

schema, including both contents and learning outcomes, that allows the incorporation of the formulation and

mechanisms for veriﬁcation that the goals are fulﬁlled.

1 INTRODUCTION

Syllabi are a key element of university teaching. In

most cases, syllabi take the form of a paper or elec-

tronic document where the key aspects of the course

are described: instructor information,course material,

assessment and grading, course calendar, etc. In other

cases, syllabi are embedded in a course web site and

can include numerous electronic resources. For stu-

dents, syllabi are the most important source of course

information. For university faculty and administra-

tors, syllabi are at the center of pedagological course

design and program offering.

Although universities usually provide course de-

scriptions in online catalogs, detailed syllabi are usu-

ally not available in a centralized location (MIT

OpenCourseWare is a nice exception): depending

on the university, they can be found in departmen-

tal or faculty personal web pages or inside protected

Learning Management Systems (LMS). When syllabi

are posted in different locations, nothing guarantees

that the content will be the same everywhere. When

course syllabi are embedded in a course web site,

the same information is often available in the HTML

pages as well as in a PDF ﬁle, leading to unnecessary

work for the instructor or the administrativestaff. Fur-

thermore, updates are often not synchronized and can

mislead the students.

Within a department or a faculty, the course web

site interfaces can be very different, adding unneces-

sary browsing difﬁculties for users in search of a very

speciﬁc piece of information. The course web sites

are most often designed and maintained using differ-

ent software tools, adding difﬁculties when staff or

instructors are assigned to different courses or depart-

ments. Finally, in many cases, no procedure insures

161

Camarero R., Fortin C., Huet G., Raynauld J. and Gerbé O. (2009).

XML-BASED COURSE SYLLABI - An Electronic Implementation of the CDIO Syllabus.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 160-165

DOI: 10.5220/0001848401600165

 SciTePress

that all the course web sites are properly archived.

Either in plain web pages or embedded in a CMS,

course syllabi of a faculty or a department are struc-

tured quite differently, which unnecessarily compli-

cates the reading tasks of students. Although uni-

versities provide templates for paper course syllabi,

these guidelines are not applied for the design of web

based syllabi which are quite different and probably

need speciﬁc interfaces more appropriate for elec-

tronic browsing. As a result, users are exposed to

quite different web interfaces and some key elements

like assignments due dates are displayed in differ-

ent locations, not necessarily optimal from a usability

perspective.

Finally, the information contained in a LMS or in

a course website is often duplicated in parallel admin-

istrative systems. For reporting or administrative pur-

poses, many universities seek speciﬁc course infor-

mation like the objectives of the course, the evaluation

method (assignments, exams, etc) and broad descrip-

tions of topics covered. This is particularly the case

for professional accreditation purposes, which require

the formulation of learning outcomes and speciﬁca-

tion of mechanisms for veriﬁcation that these goals

are fulﬁlled. As these parallel administrative systems,

when they exist, are not generally linked to course

syllabi, special reports seeking precise elements of

teaching and learning are not possible.

In this paper, we present a framework designed to

provide a solution to these important questions, com-

bining Open Syllabus (Gerb´e and Raynauld, 2005)

and the CDIO Syllabus (Crawley E.F., 2007). Open

Syllabus is an electronic environment using a XML

model-based approach, which aims to replace both

simple traditional syllabi and more elaborate web syl-

labi by providing a structured approach using tem-

plates, reserved vocabulary, uniﬁed web user inter-

face, centralized location and integration with admin-

istrative systems. The CDIO Syllabus is a compre-

hensivecodiﬁcation of knowledge, skills and attitudes

which constitutes a requirements document for con-

temporary engineering education.

Building on the work carried out at HEC

Montr´eal on

Zone Cours

(http://zonecours.hec.ca)

and at

Ecole Polytchnique on the CDIO implemen-

tation, a methodology to structure and assemble the

various elements required in an electronic syllabus or

course web site is investigated.

2 THE SYLLABUS

2.1 Organization of a Course Outline

Due to their importance as the cornerstone of teaching

and learning, universities provide guidelines, sugges-

tions and even templates on the proper use of course

syllabi. Numerous researchers have conﬁrmed the

central role played by syllabi. For (Parkes and Har-

ris, 2002), syllabi serve three major roles: the syl-

labus as a contract, the syllabus as a permanent record

and the syllabus as a learning tool, and provide a very

detailed example of a course syllabus with 12 spe-

ciﬁc elements or sections. In a recent paper, (Mar-

cis and Carr, 2004) report on a student survey about

the relative importance of 23 distinct elements usu-

ally present in a course outline. Table 1 illustrates a

simple mapping of the purposes of a syllabus and its

associated elements.

Table 1: Mapping of the various syllabus elements into its

purposes.

1. The syllabus as a learning tool

1.1. Title and authors of textbooks and readings

1.2. Course goals and objectives

1.3. Course format (for example, lecture, discussion, videos,

classroom activities)

1.4. Attendance policy

1.5. Late assignment policy

1.6. Academic dishonesty policy

1.7. Class participation requirements

1.8. Examination and quiz dates

1.9. Schedule of topics to be covered

1.10. Holidays observed

1.11. Amount of work (for example, amount of reading, number

and length of other assignments)

2. The syllabus as a contract

2.1. Grading procedure and policies

2.2. Number of examinations and quizzes

2.3. Kind of assignments (for example, readings, papers,

presentations, projects)

2.4. Reading material covered by each examination or quiz

2.5. Type of examinations and quizzes (for example, multiple

choice, essay)

3. The syllabus as an administrative record

3.1. Instructor information (for example, name, title, ofﬁce,

location, phone number, e-mail address)

3.2. Instructors ofﬁce hours

3.3. Course information (for example, course number and title,

section number, credit hours)

3.4. Course description

3.5. Days, hours, and location of class meetings

3.6. Required prerequisite coursework necessary to enroll in the

course

These papers as well as the analysis of numerous

course outlines (including those of the MIT Open-

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

162

CourseWare initiative) show that it is quite feasible

to propose a model or a template that would incorpo-

rate most if not all the basic constituents of a course

syllabus. The wording of the different elements could

change across universities but, as the tables make it

clear, the meaning of the different elements can be

made quite precise. One can imagine the construction

of a set of automatic rules that could help to translate

syllabi of different universities.

3 THE CDIO INITIATIVE

3.1 The Syllabus

Four leading engineering universities

have proposed

a new engineering education model, named CDIO

(D. R. Brodeur and Ostlund, 2002). The CDIO Ini-

tiative seeks to re-emphasized the role of actual engi-

neering practice in balance with the current engineer-

ing science model. This aims at training expert engi-

neers who master the technical fundamentals of their

ﬁeld while acquiring the skills required to function

in industrial enterprises, developing complex value-

added engineering systems in modern team-based,

multidisciplinary environments.

The learning activities are tightly integrated

with the engineering process of product develop-

ment around four phases: Conceiving-Designing-

Implementing-Operating.

In previous papers, Ed Crawley and his colleages

have developed and codiﬁed a comprehensive under-

standing of abilities needed by the contemporary en-

gineer (Crawley, 2001). Known as the CDIO Syl-

labus, this codiﬁcation is the set of knowledge, skills

and attitudes expected from a graduating engineer.

Initially designed as a requirements document for de-

signing and implementing undergraduate engineering

programs, it turned out to closely correlate with the

criteria for accrediting engineering programs (ABET,

2000). It is consists in four high level requirements,

which can be further detailled into second, third etc...

levels objectives. This hierarchical breakdown makes

the transition from the high level goals, to the level of

course units or lectures. The depth or degree of gran-

ularity is the matter of speciﬁc curriculum for each

ﬁeld.

For conciseness and to maintain a generic presen-

tation, a condensed form of the CDIO Syllabus with

Chalmers University of Technology, Link¨oping Uni-

versity, and the Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden,

and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA,

and which have been joined by several other engineering

schools throughout the world.

4. CDIO

Conceive−Design−Implement−Operate

2. Personal and professional 3. Interpersonal skills:

Teamwork and communication

1. Technical knowledge

and reasoning

skills and attributes

Figure 1: Structure of the CDIO Syllabus.

the 1st and 2nd levels is shown in Table 2. (Bankel J.,

2005)

Table 2: Condensed Presentation of First Two Levels of the

CDIO Syllabus.

1. TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING

1.1. KNOWLEDGE OF UNDERLYING SCIENCES

1.2. CORE ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

1.3. ADVANCED ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTAL KNOWL-

EDGE

2. PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND AT-

TRIBUTES

2.1. ENGINEERING REASONING AND PROBLEM SOLVING

2.2. EXPERIMENTATION AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY

2.3. SYSTEM THINKING

2.4. PERSONAL SKILLS AND ATTRIBUTES

2.5. PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ATTITUDES

3. INTERPERSONAL SKILLS: TEAMWORK AND COMMUNI-

CATION

3.1. TEAMWORK

3.2. COMMUNICATIONS

3.3. COMMUNICATION IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

4. CONCEIVING, DESIGNING, IMPLEMENTING, AND OPER-

ATING SYSTEMS IN THE ENTERPRISE AND SOCIETAL

CONTEXT

4.1. EXTERNAL AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT

4.2. ENTERPRISE AND BUSINESS CONTEXT

4.3. CONCEIVING AND ENGINEERING SYSTEMS

4.4. DESIGNING

4.5. IMPLEMENTING

4.6. OPERATING

3.2 Speciﬁcation of Learning Outcomes

In addition to the Syllabus, where the contents are

outlined, the CDIO initiative introduces the goals

or learning outcomes for knowledge and skills in

a systematic way. To deal with these aspects,

(Bankel J., 2005) have proposed the Introduce-Teach-

Utilize (ITU) concept.

Introduce(I) : topics that are introduced in the course,

but not subject to examination.

Teach(T) : knowledge and skills that are taught in the

course and also subject to examination.

Utilize(U) : knowledge and skills that have been ac-

quired in previous courses and are considered to

be prerequisites.

Table 3 illustrates a generic application of this concept

for a course. A more thorough presentation is given

XML-BASED COURSE SYLLABI - An Electronic Implementation of the CDIO Syllabus

163

Table 3: Example of a Course Level ITU-matrix.

SYLLABUS LEVELS

COURSE 1 2 3 4

CONTENT 1.x.x 2.x.x 3.x.x 4.x.x

Topic 1 T I U

Topic 2 T U

Topic 3 I

Topic .... T U

in (Gunnarsson S., 2007) including courses as well as

entire curriculum applications.

4 THE OPEN SYLLABUS MODEL

In the spirit of (Tungare and al, 2006), who advocate

the use of standardized representations, (Gerb´e and

Raynauld, 2009) have proposed a model, illustrated

in Figure 2, that could accommodate numerous types

of syllabi. The nodes are deﬁned as follows:

• CourseOutline corresponds to the syllabus or the

course outline.

• CourseStructure organizes CourseUnits.

• CourseUnit is a section of a course outline. In-

structor information, Lectures calendar and Gen-

eral course information are examples of CourseU-

nit elements.

• CourseUnitStructure is a sub-section of a section.

CourseUnitStructure organizes the information of

a CourseUnit. For example, the lecture could be

devided in two parts.

• CourseUnitContent is the key pedagogical con-

tainer of all the learning resources. CourseUnit-

Content includes the readings, the ﬁles and the as-

signments typically found in a lecture.

• CourseProxyResource is a proxy that serves to

qualify the use of a particular resource in a

CourseUnitContent. For example, a reading could

be mandatory in a course but optional in another.

• Ressource is a very low level element that corre-

sponds to some speciﬁc learning material; for ex-

ample PowerPoint ﬁles, citations, urls, text ﬁles,

assignment guidelines.....

LecturesExams

Outline

Overview

COStructure

COUnit

COUnitContent

COUnitStructure

COProxyResource

Resourse

Lect. 3 lect. 4

Part IIPart I

Exam 1 Exam 2 Lect. 1 Lect. 2

Course

Figure 2: Structure of the Proposed Course Outline Model,

adapted from (Gerb´e and Raynauld, 2009).

Figure 3: Page for Lecture 1.

Figure 3 illustrates the model in the context of

a simple course outline created with OpenSyllabus

Sakai 2.5 tool based on GoogleWebToolKit(GWT).

The tree on the left displays the CoStructure elements

(Introduction, Contact information, Learning mate-

rial, Assignment and Exams and Lectures). There are

CourseUnit elements represented by 12 different lec-

tures. The resources in the Lecture 1 page on the right

hand side panel are part of a CoUnitContent. The de-

scription is a text resource with the rubric Description

put on the CoproxyResource. The objectives are also

a text resource with the rubric Objectives put on the

CoproxyResource. The last resource is a Power Point

ﬁle with the title Presentation slides and the rubric Re-

sources used in class put in the CoproxyResource.

The XML ﬁle corresponding to the course outline

of Figure 3 is given in Figure 4. As explained be-

fore, the CoUnitContent contains a text Resource with

associated CoProxyResource set to CoContentRubric

Rubric=Description and some other useful properties

like the security which is set to public. CDATA con-

tains the text. This XML description is the building

block for the OpenSyllabus GWT editor and can lead

to very sophisticated operations for reused or display.

5 COURSE INFORMATION

MANAGEMENT

5.1 LMS-XML Integration

To our knowledge, most Learning management Sys-

tems such as Moodle, do not currently offer tools or

plug-ins to create and edit XML-based course out-

lines. Although, it quite easy to construct and display

a course website that will mimic the vocabulary, the

presentation and the content of Figure 3, the under-

lying structure cannot be manipulated since it is not

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

164

</properties>

<text>

<![

CDATA

[ <P>In the first class, we will cover the

course outline and evaluation. We will discuss the

role of business processes and information systems

within the company using the Zara case. The BIAIT

technique will be presented to help us identify

some of the firm’s business processes.

</P>]]>

</text>

</properties>

</COResource>

</COResourceProxy>

...

</COUnitContent>

Figure 4: XML code fragment for the production of the

Page of Figure 3.

model-based. LMS’s cannot recognize that the con-

tent underneath the title:

Objective

in that ﬁgure are

indeed the learning objectives of Lecture 1.

In some preliminary work, we have explored the

possibility of linking XML-based syllabi to Moodle.

Figure 5 illustrates the results of a plug-in that can

read an OpenSyllabus XML ﬁle similar to the one

presented here. The XML ﬁle imported for that ex-

ample included the description and the objectives of

the course as well as the title of the different lectures

and their content.

With the current prototype, the instructor can edit

the resulting content but the changes will not be added

to the underlying XML ﬁle. Further work is necessary

to enable both import and edit/export XML capabil-

ities in Moodle. However, the prototype opens in-

teresting avenues concerning the integration of stan-

dardized course related content in LMS’s. For ex-

ample, one can imagine that ofﬁcial description of

courses, learning objectives and university policies

can be pushed to course websites in a similar fashion.

It is also possible to develop and use simple XML ed-

itors (for example the GWT OpenSyllabus editor) to

generate the XML ﬁle to be imported in th LMS for

ﬁnal use by the instructor and the students.

5.2 Reporting: Accreditation

For professional accreditation purposes, an essential

fonction is to measure the program outcomes which

Figure 5: Moodle screen capture resulting from the import

of a Open Syllabus XML ﬁle.

is based on the capability to compare and assess the

quality of the training given at different universities.

Besides gathering speciﬁc and precise information

such as the number of hours given to some particu-

lar subject matter, the ability to extract the formula-

tion of learning objectives and outcomes of individ-

ual courses as well as of entire education programs is

now becoming increasingly important. In addition,

this would assist instructors in mapping course de-

sign to measurable outcomes, thus helping the pro-

cess of institutional program offering. This requires

to complete work on reporting standards currently in

progress (Course Description Metada).

5.3 A Course Information System

A syllabus can be viewed as a collection of metadata

for a course, which leads to an integrated workﬂow

approach to manage all the course information. The

development of Open Syllabus as a specialized Syl-

labus Editor to help create and edit syllabi will en-

courage adoption of such schema as the CDIO or sim-

ilar codiﬁcations adapted to other ﬁelds.

Of strategic importance is the integration of a syl-

labus editor into course management systems so that

the use of such specialized tools will be seamless from

the instructor’s point of view. Furthermore, linking

these parallel administrative systems to course syllabi

as shown in Figure 6, could aleviate repetitive work

XML-BASED COURSE SYLLABI - An Electronic Implementation of the CDIO Syllabus

165

Accreditation bodies

Government agencies

REPORTING:

Open

CourseWare

Websites

Resources

Activities

etc....

COURSE

WEBSITE

Skills

Workplan

Objectives

Description

Evaluation

ADMINISTRATIVE

SYSTEMS

Figure 6: Overall System Architecture.

for both faculty and administrative staff, as well as

avoiding many sources of errors resulting from the

lack of synchronization of updates.

This integration of administrative and pedagogical

systems will result in:

• faster and more accurate content search;

• enhanced sharing of syllabi and learning re-

sources by providing export/import possibilities;

• provide a completely open gateway to the public

content of all course syllabi in the spirit of the

MIT OpenCourseWare project.

6 DEVELOPMENT OBJECTIVES

The lack of standardization of a semantic descrip-

tion of syllabi has resulted in a wide variety of for-

mats with serious drawbacks. This paper has sketched

the development of an electronic syllabus based on

a XML model which semantically tags the set of

detailed elements of the CDIO Syllabus. This ap-

proach is quite ﬂexible and each university could eas-

ily parametrize the various elements of the model as

well as the vocabulary used, while keeping a semantic

suitable for sharing.

The authors believethat, for OpenSyllabus to have

its intended impact, it needs to be integrated into the

current pedagogical practices of educators and ad-

ministrators. In particular, the adoption of a model-

based course outline approach requires some integra-

tion with the course management systems used in dif-

ferent universities. In some cases, a generic GWT

OpenSyllabus tool or some kind of advanced XML

editor can be used directly by instructors and support

staff to create, edit and publish structured syllabi. In

other cases, taking advantage of its light or minimal

web services architecture, the GWT OpenSyllabus

client can be linked much more closely to a course

management system as it is the case for an alpha pro-

totype version of OpenSyllabus/Sakai. In other cases,

the course management system itself could provide

XML editing capabilities or could be modiﬁed to han-

dle XML tagging. Whichever path chosen, an XML

based approach to course outline like Open Syllabus

could foster a much better integration of pedagogical

information with administrative systems, providing a

cost effective solution to the increasing reporting re-

quirements from international agreements or accredi-

tation agencies.

It can be envisionned that the availability of elec-

tronic syllabi, using an XML-based approach will

make the content of a course much more reusable and

open up possibilities for publication in a wide range

of formats.

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