Towards a Support System for Course Design

Omar Talbi

1,2

, Bruno Warin

1,3

and Christophe Kolski

3,4,5

Univ Littoral Côte d’Opale, LISIC, 50 rue Ferdinand Buisson, F-62100 Calais, France

Univ. Aboubekr BELKAID, Tlemcen, Algeria

Univ Lille Nord de France, 1bis rue Georges Lefèvre, F-59000 Lille, France

UVHC, LAMIH, Le Mont-Houy, F-59313 Valenciennes, France

UVHC, LAMIH, CNRS, UMR 8201, F-59313 Valenciennes, France

Keywords: Course Design, Instructional Engineering, Higher Education, Support System, LCMS, TCMS.

Abstract: Many stakeholders in higher education develop with time. In this paper, we propose a new type of platform,

called a Teaching Content Management System (TCMS). Such platforms are intended for instructors to help

them produce teaching specifications and quality teaching designs. We first of all present drivers of change

that currently affect universities and we discuss some specific aspects of education in higher education. We

then derive a set of support requirements for instructors and provide a services design that TCMS should

comply with.

1 INTRODUCTION

Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS),

also called Learning Management Systems (LMS)

have been developed gradually over the past fifteen

years across all levels of education (Zou et al.,

2012). These Internet-based platforms are mainly

designed to foster the creation and sharing of

content, and interaction between instructors and

students, by using the Web (Bennett et al., 2006).

Almost all universities make LCMS available to

their students and instructors such platforms as

Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com) or Moodle

(http://moodle.org). LCMS platforms provide rich

opportunities for teaching students, but few

opportunities, if any, to help instructors in specifying

and designing their teaching courses.

Therefore, most instructors manage the

preparation and design of their courses in a

traditional manner and are poorly equipped in

information technology in the area of specification

and design of their teaching courses (Ottenbreit-

Leftwich et al., 2012). The question of developing a

support system to help instructors to specify and

professionally manage the construction of their

teaching courses was raised with a view to

supplement LCMS. In Section 2, we first show the

development factors and constraints that currently

weigh on higher education. In Section 3, we set out

the objectives for TCMS in the form of strategic

support requirements that the TCMS should satisfy,

based on the analysis of the previous section, some

specific aspects of higher education and our long

years of experience in higher education. In Section

4, we then propose a preliminary design in the form

of a system comprising three support axes that are

detailed as follows: 1) improving instructor

knowledge and professional skills 2) management of

a professional knowledge base 3) project realization.

In Section 5 we discuss about TCMS as a new

concept and also about its practical implementation

and usefulness. In Section 6, we offer our

conclusions and perspectives for future research.

2 STATE OF ART OF

DEVELOPMENT FACTORS

WEIGHING ON HIGHER

EDUCATION

The profession of instructor has been changed by

several development factors in recent years. Six

important factors are presented in this section.

An initial factor relates to the continuing

progress of ICT that transcends communication,

coordination, knowledge management, production of

learning tool or objects and the scripting of teaching.

449

Talbi O., Warin B. and Kolski C..

Towards a Support System for Course Design.

DOI: 10.5220/0004411704490454

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 449-454

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

This first factor has caused the President of Stanford

University to state "Just as technology disrupted and

transformed the newspaper and music industries, it

is now poised to wreak havoc upon another

established industry: higher education" (Hennessy,

2012).

A second factor relates to how the mission

entrusted to higher education has developed. Thus, a

vast professionalization movement has lead to the

requirement of providing training programs that are

closer to the concerns of businesses while seeking to

provide training throughout life (Pisa, 2005). This

leads to an evolution in the perception of knowledge

and to the development of curricula definitions

based on skills and business rationale with more

useful knowledge that can be immediately applied

(D'Andrea and Gosling, 2005).

A third factor relates to the professionalization of

instructors and educational systems. It is reflected in

the many reforms of university systems and a vast

movement for the development of quality assurance

(Manjula and Vaideeswaran, 2011). It participates in

the consideration of teaching as a project where the

product is student learning (Van Rooij, 2010).

A fourth factor relates to the changing profile of

students, particularly in respect of their number and

behaviour. This "Y" generation is more critical of

the relevance of knowledge that the university

wishes to teach it, than the previous generation

(Roberson, 2011). Thus, we need a teaching design

framework that produces more elaborate teaching

activities capable of adapting to this new audience.

A fifth factor is the considerable growth and

diversification of knowledge taught. This makes

knowledge more difficult to acquire and less

sustainable. Thus the search of knowledge and it

capitalization are becoming fondamental.

A sixth factor relates to advances in the diffusion

of research in teaching and learning. Indeed during

the last two decades, this research has led to the

emergence of new ideas such as active learning,

significant learning, and educative assessment.

These techniques are better suited to new student

profiles and enable the development of learning

techniques that are closer to current training needs

(Warin et al., 2011a).

This state of art shows that the knowledge and

skills that are now required for an instructor are no

longer confined exclusively to their subject, but also

relate to the use of Information Technology and

Communication (ICT), teaching systems, student

profile and expectations, the development of

knowledge and teaching methods. The major

challenge for instructors is no longer access to

knowledge but the ability to take ownership of it, to

organize relevant educational activities to enhance

the learning of their students, and to justify

themselves economically within the educational

system.

3 PROPOSITION: TCMS AS NEW

TYPE OF SUPPORT SYSTEM

Thus, the question of developing a support system to

help instructors to specify and professionally

manage the construction of their teaching courses

was raised. The top diagram in Figure 1 shows that

TCMS will help instructors by impacting on their

teaching knowledge, subject knowledge, etc., as well

as on their work methods and organization. Its goal

will be to foster the creation or development of

teaching, improve instructor skills and integrate

developments that weigh on higher education. The

entire Figure 1 shows the differences in

requirements, constraints and objectives between

TCMS and LCMS. The purpose of TCMS is

teaching specification and design, whereas the

purpose of LCMS is the implementation and

monitoring of teaching with students.

Figure 1: TCMS versus LCMS.

From an operational strategy perspective, current

technology makes it possible to foresee an Internet

based client / server tool, accessible anywhere,

anytime, on various media from a PC to a

smartphone. In fact, TCMS could use current

technology platforms such as Moodle and even be

directly integrated into them.

From a strategy point of view of functional

requirements: the support to be provided must take

into account the specific manner that Higher

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450

Education instructors operate, who, for the most

have never learned to teach (Bergin et al., 2001),

must devote an important part of their activities to

research, upon which their recognition and

promotion are based (Harzing, 2010), and finally,

for which the systematic creation principles or

methods of current learning systems, such as the

highly structured ADDIE (Molenda, 2003) or MISA

(Paquette, 2010), do not correspond to their work

traditions. Having to learn to use any computer-

software teaching tool is one of the major hindrances

to their use (Rößling et al., 2008). Thus, TCMS

should incorporate its own learning system and be

used at different levels of expertise adapted to the

skills of the instructor who uses it.

4 THREEFOLD DESIGN OF

TCMS

In order to assist instructor in these new challenges,

we suggest that TCMS be built around three support

axes: 1) Improving the instructor knowledge and

professions skills 2) Management of a professional

knowledge base and 3) Project realization. These

three axes are detailed here after. This threefold

design enables ownership to be taken in an iterative

and incremental manner. The instructor is free to use

one or more axes. Inside the first axis, ownership

can be taken through several levels provided by a

framework based on five sub-axes. Thus the

instructor is free to build their engineering at their

own pace. In doing so, our platform can include both

the first time instructor, or the inexperienced

instructor, and the experienced instructor.

4.1 Support for Improving Instructor

Knowledge and Professional Skills

Providing support to instructors by making updated

knowledge and skills related to their instructor

profession available to them. This axis will not

simply be a mere repository of knowledge, but will

also offer activities to learn and master these skills

and knowledge. We propose that this axis be

structured and developed through a framework that

consists of five quality sub-axes: (1) Teaching

technique, (2) Subjects (knowledge to be taught), (3)

Scripting (4) Technology and (5) Research and

innovation. Using a framework to frame the content

of this axis has two advantages: it will organize the

implementation of the future system, but it will also,

by being designed with relatively independent sub-

axes, offer multiple entries to future teaching users

that will facilitate the full adhesion of instructors to

the system, through the possibility of gradual

ownership.

Teaching Technique. This sub-axis relates to

teaching basics. Its goal is to help instructors in

identifying and taking ownership of basic teaching

techniques. This sub-axis of the future platform will

be responsible for managing teaching basics and

basic teaching techniques, such as: knowing how to

classify knowledge to be taught, knowing how to

define educational objectives, knowing student

learning conditions and strategies, etc. This part will

be based on the classical works of Bloom,

Krathwohl, Mager, Glaser, Gagne, Jonassen, etc., for

which we do not provide an exhaustive list of

references in this article due to lack of space. An

interested reader can refer to Talon et al. (2012) for

more information. The knowledge required for the

"Teaching Technique" sub-axis is more of the

academic knowledge type and will require limited

effort by the instructor to master.

Figure 2: High-level use case of the “Support for

improving instructor knowledge and professional skills”

axis.

This "Teaching technique" sub-axis will also

offer, 1) learning activities to learn the basic

teaching techniques, 2) software for validating

teaching knowledge, and 3) course definition tools.

All or part of the results produced, such as the

teaching objectives, can be automatically exported,

depending on the opportunity, to the LCMS part of

the platform to be brought to the knowledge of

students. Figure 2 illustrates the main use cases for

this "Teaching Technique" sub-axis. These use cases

TowardsaSupportSystemforCourseDesign

451

are written in the well-known UML language

(http://www.uml.org/).

Subjects. This sub-axis relates to the content to be

taught: computer science, mathematics, languages,

etc. It aims to make resources validated by the best

experts in the field available to instructors. Semi-

automatic quality assessment tools of a priori

resources can be integrated into this sub-axis.

Indeed, an unidentified or authorless resource can be

detected a priori as being of lesser quality. Similarly,

in order to be classified as quality, these resources

should not be mere knowledge repositories, but must

be "comprehensive" in the sense that they must be

accompanied by a teaching framework that

facilitates their ownership or adaptation by the

instructor: context, wording, specific correction

elements, precise evaluation criteria, feedback, etc.

Professional monitoring, based on peer review and

feedback, can be put in place to assess the quality

and relevance of resources.

Scripting. This sub-axis relates to more developed

and more practical knowledge in relation to

teaching. It aims to enable instructors to identify and

take ownership of complex teaching strategies, such

as, for example, serious games techniques or project-

based learning. The volume and complexity of

additional knowledge that instructors have to master

is not the same as those of the "Teaching.

Technology. This sub-axis relates to the technology

for helping instructors in relation to teaching

methods. These are generic tools, whereas the

technology tools related to the subject taught will be

associated with the "Subjects" sub-axis. For

example, visualization software to run a sorting

algorithm will be integrated into the “Subjects” sub-

axis. The purpose of this "Technology" sub-axis is to

facilitate the use of ICT by instructors to manage

their teaching activities. For example, in the near

future, instructors that have mastered the Moodle or

Blackboard type e-learning platform will have a

distinct advantage. All the more as there are recent

techniques that facilitate their configuration (Drira et

al., 2011).

Research and Innovation. This sub-axis relates to

knowledge, processes and tools that facilitate the

production of knowledge and innovation practices. It

aims to help instructors in mastering the techniques

of knowledge acquisition or creation, be they

teaching or subject knowledge as advocated by

Labour and Kolski (2010). It is important that an

instructor masters access to bibliography databases

and to simple techniques, that are not well know by

many instructors, in relation to quality indices such

the impact factor, the h-index and the g-index

(Harzing, 2010), etc.

4.2 Support for the Management of a

Professional Knowledge

Whether to support the creation or development of

their teaching or to achieve research results,

instructors need to improve and manage their

professional knowledge. The purpose of this axis is

to provide a content management system that

enables them to store, classify and enrich their

professional knowledge.

In this content management system we need to

distinguish free knowledge from other knowledge.

Free knowledge can be freely modified and

distributed without charge by the instructor. Free

knowledge, even if there are different modalities of

implementation (http://creativecommons.org) is the

only knowledge that the teacher can reuse, improve,

adapt and distribute for free during his teachings.

The concept of free knowledge is important because

it allows the teacher to remain master of his own

issues: reducing the time spent in preparation, high

quality educational resources provided, accuracy of

knowledge disseminated and adaptation to the

student audience.

Traditional knowledge can be managed

effectively in the TCMS with bibliographic

management tools such as for example, Mendeley

software (http://Mendeley.com), possibly with

additional functions and search rankings. Free

knowledge included in the TCMS will be managed

using a tool that combines the functions of a

traditional CMS for its ability to store and organize

knowledge, with those of a versioning tool.

Evolutions must be stored including dates and major

changes but also the identification of their

contributors. Free knowledge does not mean

anonymous knowledge. In addition, in connection

with the third axis, Support for project realization,

the tool will provide support for the capitalization of

knowledge, acquired during the implementation of

these third axis projects.

4.3 Support for Project Realization

This is the provision of support for the good

management of instructor activities during the

preparation and implementation of their teaching

courses. We recommend a project management

approach, in the sense of industrial project

management (PMBOK, 2008). In this context, the

TCMS will encourage and support the instructor, via

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the available tools, to rigorously set their teaching

specification: topics, prerequisites, content, teaching

objectives, start and end dates, specific material

conditions, etc. It will also enable the incorporation

of specific context: implementation of teaching

objectives, estimated time set aside for preparation,

the instructor’s level of command of the subject

being taught, the instructor’s personal goals in

respect of the teaching, etc.

A major objective of the specification of this

project mode is to get the instructors to capitalize the

fruit of their teaching over course to be taken from

one year to another and to be enriched, etc., but it

should also support instructors in bringing together

several teaching courses, whether they come from

them or from a colleague.

5 DISCUSSION

In this section we discuss if TCMS is a new concept

and also we discuss its practical implementation and

usefulness.

Related Works. The first question concerns existing

previous works. Is this concept of TCMS new? Are

there existing tools to support it? In our literature

search we found similarities with the proposed

concept in the Drona work of Anjali (2011).

However, no theoretical support is given. There is

also little detail. Some other works such as (Polson

et al., 2005) introduce a TCMS but reading the

relevant articles shows that they actually speak of an

LCMS not of a TCMS. Several works such as

(Juang et al., 2008), which are interested in

improving teaching skills and teaching practices, are

more interested by the relationship between teacher

and his institution. Again these works cover a very

small part of axis 3 of the TCMS. They do not offer

a global solution to the teacher. We could not cite all

the research related to our proposal, particularly the

works carried out by the English-speaking

institutions (English, American, Australian and

Canadian) in the movement "scholarship of teaching

and learning" (SoTL, http). However, to the best of

our knowledge, the concept of TCMS proposed in

this article is new, or at least very little developed so

far in the literature.

Design Choice. The second question in this

discussion is the design of our tool. What type (s) of

tool (s) to develop? Apart from the fact that it will be

Web-based, several options are available to us. We

chose to develop it by integrating it in a CMS. For

our first tests, we chose the popular Moodle

platform. Figure 3 shows a possible integration that

takes advantage of the malleability of Moodle in

which three spaces were created for the three axes

described in this article. This type of development

that will reuse part of the back-office, such as user

management, should also promote the adoption of

our tool by teachers who are already using this type

of LCMS (of course, assessment will carried out to

prove this) and facilitate the provision to students of

lessons designed by teachers.

Figure 3: Mock-up of the TCMS home page.

Utility Considerations. The third question concerns

the usefulness of such a platform. Would these tools

be useful? Our specifications were used in few

courses. Some of the tools used were MS-Project

and the Moodle platform. A part of implementation

has however been done manually. As result of this

first experimentation, teachers concerned won an

Award for Educational Innovation in a contest that

involved seven French universities (Warin et al.,

2011b). These teachers did not follow all the

suggestions of our specification, but those that were

contributed to the winning.

6 CONCLUSIONS

This article looked at instructor-centered teaching

engineering in academia. We highlighted six major

development factors that require the rethinking of

instructor work methods. We proposed a supplement

to LCMS introduced in universities by adding a new

type of feature: Teaching Content Management

System (TCMS). The goal of a TCMS is to support

instructors in the specification and design of their

teaching so that they reach a high level of

professionalism. We have emphasized that TCMS

should be designed to enable iterative and

incremental ownership. We therefore proposed a

general design of the services that TCMS should

offer. The first prototype of a TCMS is under

TowardsaSupportSystemforCourseDesign

453

development. It aims to make the system more

holistic than the short presentation in three axes

suggests. Next works will focus to prove that its use

provides assistance to engage the instructor in

reflexive inquiry of its practices and facilitates

opportunities to work with other colleagues. Indeed,

a collective effort should be based on individual

strong skills: to be a strong individual support to the

instructor it’s exactly the purpose of a TCMS.

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