Prototyping a New Smart Learning Management System Based on the NoSQL

Introduction

eLearning is a fast and efficient way of providing and sharing knowledge with learners in different parts of the world.

According to (Liu, 2010; Faten, 2013), it is defined as the following: “eLearning uses the Internet or other digital content for learning and education activities, that takes full advantage of modern educational technology to provide a new mechanism for communication and learning environment rich in resources to achieve a new way of learning.”

eLearning is promoted through educational platforms: integrated systems offer a wide range of activities in the learning process. Teachers use the platforms to monitor or evaluate the work of students. They use LMSs to create courses, tests, etc. However, the LMS does not offer personalized services and therefore does not take into account the aspects of personalization such as the level of knowledge, interest, motivation, and goals of learners. They access the same resource sets in the same way.

We present an easy disciplinary information model of the new smart LMS to create and administer the educational content online. This tool allows the generation and editing structures of websites through a database rather than pedagogical models, with a variety of choices that ensures better adaptation to the teaching of the course and learning style. Therefore, it is necessary to find a method to model all LMSs types. To model the disciplinary information space of our new LMS we have based ourselves upon the IMS-LD specification focusing on four learning theories that were judged the most important and relevant to our modeling, namely the traditional pedagogy, behaviorism, cognitivism, and social constructivism. Then, these learning theories which have inspired for a long time the design of computer applications are combined and put into perspective with several emergent pedagogical functionalities to build original modeling of disciplinary information space for our new smart LMS. This reveals that this proposed modeling that is presented to readers here looks for ways to leverage technology for learning by considering users as being human actors and not human factors (Henri and al., 2007).

The IMS-LD specification or instructional design engineering uses pedagogical concepts, allowing to model learning units. IMS-LD takes into account a wide variety of teaching models it is there its flexibility. A course plan extract of a general or specific database can be modeled with IMS-LD, through the description of the different roles, activities, environments, methods, properties, conditions, and notifications. It is used to transform the course plans into formal learning units (UOL) that can be performed with an IMS-LD editor based on an engine such as Copper core (Alfanet project, 2008). These executable units can be designed from the beginning using an editor such as Reload (Bolton, 2005).

Based on these various research works, which seemed to us incomplete, we proposed a modeling portrait of designing an IMS-LD model of the disciplinary information space for our new smart LMS. The latter is anthropocentric and relies on a learning conception that is located at the intersection of the most used learning theories. Indeed, the idea is to orient the design work research towards great and optimal compatibility between the services offered by eLearning platforms and the needs of all users, particularly learners, for better optimization of online learning.