October 2006 Volume 9 Number 4

Choquet, C., & Corbière, A. (2006). Reengineering Framework for Systems in Education. Educational Technology &
Society, 9 (4), 228-241.
Reengineering Framework for Systems in Education
Christophe Choquet and Alain Corbière
LIUM Laboratory, University of Maine, IUT of Laval, 53020 Laval Cedex 9, France
christophe.choquet@lium.univ-lemans.fr
alain.corbiere@lium.univ-lemans.fr
ABSTRACT
Specifications recently proposed as standards in the domain of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL),
question the designers of TEL systems on how to put them into practice. Recent studies in Model Driven
Engineering have highlighted the need for a framework which could formalize the use of these
specifications as well as enhance the quality of the developments. This paper deals with the opportunity for
the TEL community to adopt such a model to express and formalize the design organization and the
engineering process of a TEL system. This kind of model could provide a set of concepts allowing the
description of specifying, modeling and analyzing tasks one needs to perform for defining the negotiation
and the communication between actors in such a community. In a first part, we stress the need for the
instantiation of this framework so as to integrate recent results as well as taking into account the evolution
of software reengineering. In a second part, we propose two instances of this framework; the first concerns
the reverse engineering of a TEL system and the second its reengineering.
Keywords
TEL engineering, TEL reengineering, TEL development process, Model driven engineering
Introduction
The design of TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) systems calls for the communication and sharing of
information about the users of these systems. In recent studies, the standards and specifications proposed by the
TEL community have provided interoperable languages for the specification of the learning session’s
progression, in order to enhance the communication between the actors of the development. These proposals are
mainly focused on the a priori specification of the system’s behavior. But (Wenger, 1987; Bruillard & Vivet,
1994; Hummel et al., 2004; Tchounikine et al., 2004) for instance, have shown that the design methodology of a
TEL system cannot be reduced to the specification but must also instrument the tasks of recording and analyzing
the uses of the system. Our objective is to merge TEL community results on standards and specifications, and
proposals made by the software engineering community. In this way, we aim to support the communication
between actors of development in a general reengineering framework, as Chikofsky (1990) for who
"reengineering, also known as both renovation and reclamation, is the examination and alteration of a subject
system to reconstitute it in a new form and the subsequent implementation of the new form".
Recent proposals of TEL standards and specifications lead to the adoption of new design practices and
methodologies, but they don’t provide designers with a set of concepts allowing the explicitation of the
organization and the implemented engineering. Some development solutions are provided by the Object Oriented
Software Engineering community, especially in the domain of software reengineering. With an empiric approach
first, the open source and free software communities have had to develop specific and effective tools which
support the structured communication around a design artifact. At the same time, the research community on
software engineering has provided methodological developments as well as a standardized and shared
vocabulary for software reengineering focused on the interoperability and reusability points of view. Chikofsky
(1990) for instance, proposed a first terminology dedicated to the definition of the tasks of reverse engineering
and reengineering. More recently, and based on this taxonomy, the European project ESPRIT 21975 (Bär et al.,
1999) has provided a set of patterns and pattern languages which define and standardize both methodological
concepts – such as “capture model details” or “negotiate a design” – and vocabulary – such as “process” or
“structure”.
The aim of this paper is to show how these results from the software engineering community could be used to
define a general framework, able to support a set of designers, considered as a community, involved in the
reengineering process of a TEL system. We propose to make an instance of the RM-ODP (Reference Model of
Open Distributed Processing) framework on the reengineering process of a TEL system. This reference model is
considered as a framework which coordinates and standardizes open distributed processes by the fine definition
of a set of concepts on engineering practices. Aims and motivations of this RM-ODP standard are detailed in the
document ISO/IEC 10746-1 (ISO/IEC 10746-1, 1998).
ISSN 1436-4522 (online) and 1176-3647 (print). © International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS). The authors and the forum jointly retain the
copyright of the articles. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies
are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by
others than IFETS must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from the editors at kinshuk@ieee.org.
228