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International audience; This paper aims to present an experience report on a new pedagogical technique which applies to the teaching of interactive systems: the Living Persona technique. First, we review the well-known technique of Persona that is used in some processes of realization of interactive systems. In this technique, a Persona represents an archetype of the users interacting in the system to be produced. From this Persona technique, we define the Living Persona one. Within the framework of practical work students have to specify an interactive system, this technique of Living Persona consists in making the teacher play the role of a representative of the contracting authority, who is also potentially a future user of the system to be specified. As a consequence, during his meetings with the students, the teacher has to adopt a behavior in compliance with the state of mind of the users' archetype defined by the Persona. Then we present a pedagogical scenario which integrates this Living Persona technique and we apply it to a practical work in which the students must produce an interactive system specification using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We show through a classroom experience that the practical work set up provides students with work situations close to professional realities. We evaluate the level of interactions between students and teacher and the extent to which this pedagogy influences some students behaviors. Finally, the continuation of our research is highlighted.

(Scimago Q3, ATIEF B); International audience; Project-based Learning (PBL) enables learners to carry out challenging and authentic projects through investigations. However, PBL is difficult to implement successfully because learners often lack of the self-regulation skills required to monitor, reflect, manage and assess their project activities and learning. Furthermore, most learning systems rarely offer possibilities to monitor and reflect on their project and learning processes. Hence, in this paper, we propose a general architecture of Project-based Learning Management System (PBLMS). It enhances learners’ reflective processes by supporting them in creating customizable indicators by exploring their traces. We developed an implementation named DDART and conducted an experiment in order to evaluate its usability and perceived utility. We found that this system supports learners to reflect and regulate their activities and learning, even if the indicator creation could be difficult for the novices.

International audience; Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) are data visualization tools built to empower teachers and learners to make purposeful decisions that impact the learning process. Due to their relatively recent emergence and the scarcity of studies on their design principles, dashboard design remains a major area of investigation in learning analytics research, and large scale diffusion to their stakeholders remains limited. We promote human-centered approaches for LADs design since their success in terms of acceptance and adoption greatly depends on the level of stakeholder involvement in their design. In this paper, we present a tool to support the participatory design of LADs. First experiments during a pilot study with teachers demonstrate that the proposed tool encourages group work, and in-depth exploration of LADs use.

International audience; This paper intends to explore how the generation logic and the elements involved are expressed from the teachers' viewpoint, in the context of learning games. We present an interview-based exploratory study: preparation, realization, analysis, and findings. From the results we also propose a dedicated metamodel to capture these expressed elements and logic. We evaluate this metamodel by developing a high-level generator component about the practice of times tables.

International audience; Pretrained models through self-supervised learning have been recently introduced for both acoustic and language modeling. Applied to spoken language understanding tasks, these models have shown their great potential by improving the state-of-the-art performances on challenging benchmark datasets. In this paper, we present an error analysis reached by the use of such models on the French MEDIA benchmark dataset, known as being one of the most challenging benchmarks for the slot filling task among all the benchmarks accessible to the entire research community. One year ago, the state-of-art system reached a Concept Error Rate (CER) of 13.6% through the use of an end-to-end neural architecture. Some months later, a cascade approach based on the sequential use of a fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 model and a fine-tuned BERT model reaches a CER of 11.2%. This significant improvement raises questions about the type of errors that remain difficult to treat, but also about those that have been corrected using these models pre-trained through self-supervision learning on a large amount of data. This study brings some answers in order to better understand the limits of such models and open new perspectives to continue improving the performance.

With the emergence of neural end-to-end approaches for spoken language understanding, a growing number of studies on speech intent detection have been presented during these last three years and new benchmark datasets have been produced. In this paper, we focus on the French benchmark dataset MEDIA, created in 2005 and distributed freely for academic research by ELRA since 2020.This dataset has been shown as being the most challenging one in its domain but is unfortunately not much used beyond the French research community. To facilitate its use, a complete recipe has been integrated to SpeechBrain, a toolkit based on PyTorch. Corrections were brought to the initial manual annotations. The new version of MEDIA will be distributed by ELRA. We used a significant amount of data collected during the construction of MEDIA and never used until now to create a new corpus called test2. Last, we discuss evaluation issues., Nous discutons ici du jeu de données françaises de référence MEDIA, créé en 2005 et distribué par ELRA gratuitement pour la recherche académique depuis 2020. Bien que parmi les plus riches et complexes à traiter, ces données sont rarement utilisées au-delà de la communauté scientifique française. Pour en faciliter l'usage dans un contexte d'apprentissage profond, une recette complète a été intégrée à SpeechBrain, une boite à outils logicielle dédiée au traitement de la parole par des approches neuronales, de plus en plus populaire au niveau international. De plus, des corrections ont été apportées aux annotations manuelles, proposées par différents chercheurs ayant régulièrement travaillé sur ces données. Cette nouvelle version du corpus sera intégrée au catalogue de ELRA. Un nouvel ensemble de données jamais utilisées jusqu'à présent, mais collectées durant la création du corpus original, est également décrit. Enfin, nous abordons des considérations liées à l'évaluation de la tâche MEDIA.

International audience

International audience; In Technology Enhanced Learning field, learning analytics cover multiple research challenges, among which tracking data analysis and data indicator design and visualization. Part of our research effort is dedicated to change their design process, in order to capitalize them. This would allow us to meet a need in cost savings of design workflow and to encourage the adoption by users throughout their implications in a simplified design process. A study of the state of the art has been made to explore various solutions which could be exploited in the capitalization of indicators on both levels, design and implementation. It sets a direction toward a user-centered approach, aiming at a better control of users over their observation needs and the use of their data.

International audience

International audience; This special issue of the International Journal of Serious Games offers very valuable extensions to the best papers of the 2020 edition of the GaLA conference. The local organization committee was composed of computer scientists of Laval (France), affiliated to Le Mans Université. From the 9th to the 10th of December 2020, 500 participants attended to a well-organized conference, through their virtual avatars, and listened to 37 presentations on Serious Games and Gamification. A special session was related to Virtual Reality, in a pedagogical and gaming context. The four extended papers, published in this journal, significantly extend their original work, and were accepted through a regular peer-review process for this special issue.

The China-Europe International Symposium on Software Engineering Education (CEISEE) was evolved from the China-Europe International Symposium on Software Industry Oriented Education (CEISIE, CEIS-SIOE), which was founded in 2005, according to rapid development of software engineering education in both China and Europe; Digital technologies are becoming more present and essential in all sectors of our life. In education, the intensive usage of digital learning devices contributes to generating a large amount of trace data from digital learning activities. Intelligent exploitation of these traces represents a valuable asset for both device producers (to improve the design of the devices) and consumers (learners and teachers). In this paper, we first share our vision for better exploitation by teachers, of traces from middle schoolers' digital activities generated by their use of tools and digital learning services during different classes. This vision is a part of the AT41 project funded by the French Ministry of Education. This exploitation has to meet the requirements of the different teachers. Conducting such a project is not an easy task, because it has to consider the following issues: (i) the lack of comprehensive and clear methodology to design and exploit these traces, (ii) heterogeneity of teacher requirements that complicates their elicitation and analysis, and (iii) the diversity of trace sources. Secondly, we propose a requirement-driven architecture for Learning Analytics composed of a well-identified life cycle. This architecture is augmented by learner traces. It offers a repository storing both teacher requirements and traces to facilitate the Learning Analytics in generating relevant and valuable indicators.

International audience; This research work is part of the VEA (Virtual Environment for Animal experimentation) project. The aim of this project was to develop an alternative method based on virtual reality for learning the correct gestures in animal experimentation while respecting the rules of ethics (the Rule of 3Rs). Our goal was to facilitate this learning via digital means, and to provide trainers with an educational toolkit that allowed them to recreate virtual reality scenarios and to assess each learner's progress. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the design and operationalisation of learning situations in virtual environments, and propose solutions in the form of virtual action models that allow the user to learn the correct gestures.

The work presented in this thesis is integrated in the field of Virtual Environments for Human Learning (VRLE) whose main objective is to stimulate, support and personalize learning in virtual environments. Our mission thus established on the basis of the study and analysis of existing VRLE, was to propose technical and methodological solutions to: on the one hand, assist the teacher in the design and production of his VRLE adapted to his needs, and on the other hand, help the teacher to design, adapt and reuse his pedagogical scenarios based on virtual reality. These objectives guided the proposal of a methodological solution based on a design process that describes the course of an VRLE by detailing the actors involved and the specificities of each step of the process. We sought to provide solutions for structuring pedagogical situations in the form of reusable scenario models. During this stage, we have worked in partnership with pedagogical teams and we are initially proposing a VR-oriented pedagogical scenario model specific to this approach, characterized mainly by its genericity and flexibility, which favors its adaptation to different scenario realization contexts without the need to modify its description.Secondly, we have developed an authoring tool which reifies our VR-oriented pedagogical scenario model with the aim of enabling teachers to easily model and adapt their situations (in the form of scenarios) and generate their own VRLE. In this thesis we began by studying the literature developed on these topics. The second part of this thesis is devoted to the specification of the design and production process of VRLE. The third part of the manuscript is devoted to the development of a model of VR-oriented pedagogical scenarios. All of the points discussed in this chapter relate to educational scriptwriting and the importance of providing design patterns. We have also looked at the concepts of learning activities and learning objects inside a VRLE. These have been mentioned in the literature as essential elements for VR-oriented pedagogical situation modelling. We then show how to create an authoring tool that is simple to use, to be used by non-expert teachers, and at the same time rich in functionality to be able to adapt to their different needs. The answers to this research question will be the subject of the fourth part of this thesis.We have equipped our tool with a service for the automatic operationalisation of VR-oriented pedagogical scenarios. It has thus been experimented and evaluated with teachers with no previous experience in pedagogical scenario writing and teachers who have never been involved in the implementation of a VRLE. The editor was evaluated in particular from the point of view of utility and usability. The results obtained confirm that it is possible to design VR-oriented pedagogical scenarios as generic as possible and provides all the necessary elements for modelling such pedagogical situations. Feedback from participants particularly highlighted its ease of use and the benefit of being able to script in the virtual world.; Le travail présenté dans cette thèse s’intègre dans le domaine des Environnements Virtuelles pour l’Apprentissage Humain (EVAH) dont l’objectif principal est de susciter, accompagner et personnaliser l’apprentissage dans les environnements virtuels. Notre mission ainsi établie sur la base de l’étude et l’analyse des EVAH existants, était de proposer des solutions techniques et méthodologiques pour : d’une part, accompagner l’enseignant dans la conception et la production de son EVAH adapté à ses besoins et d’autre part, aider l’enseignant à concevoir, adapter et réutiliser ses scénarios pédagogiques basés sur la réalité virtuelle. Ces objectifs ont guidé la proposition d’une solution méthodologique basée sur un processus de conception qui décrit le déroulement d’un EVAH en détaillant les acteurs impliqués et les spécificités de chaque étape du processus.Nous avons cherché à apporter des solutions pour structurer les situations pédagogiques sous forme de modèles de scénarios réutilisables. Lors de cette étape, nous avons travaillé en partenariat avec des équipes pédagogiques et nous proposons dans un premier temps un modèle de scénario pédagogique orienté RV spécifique à cette approche caractérisée principalement par sa généricité et flexibilité qui favorisent son adaptation à des contextes de réalisation de scénario différents sans avoir besoin de modifier sa description.Dans un second temps nous avons développé un outil auteur qui réifie notre modèle de scénario pédagogique orienté RV dont le but de permettre aux enseignants de modéliser et d’adapter facilement leurs situations (sous forme de scénarios) et de générer leur propre EVAH. Dans cette thèse, nous avons commencé par étudier la littérature développée sur ces sujets. La deuxième partie de cette thèse est consacrée à la spécification du processus de conception et de production des EVAH. La troisième partie du manuscrit est consacrée consacré à l’élaboration d’un modèle de scénarios pédagogiques orientés RV. L’ensemble des points discutés dans ce chapitre concerne la scénarisation pédagogique et l’importance de fournir des patrons de conception. Nous nous sommes intéressés également aux concepts d’activités pédagogiques et objets pédagogiques dans un EVAH. Ils ont été mentionnés dans la littérature comme des éléments essentiels pour la modélisation de situation pédagogique orientée RV. Nous montrons, par la suite, comment créer un outil auteur simple à prendre en main, pour être utilisé par des enseignants non experts, et à la fois riche en fonctionnalités pour pouvoir s’adapter à leurs différents besoins et les réponses apportées à cette question de recherche feront l’objet de la quatrième partie de cette thèse.Nous avons doté notre outil auteur d’un service d’opérationnalisation automatique des scénarios pédagogiques orientés RV. Il a été, ainsi, expérimenté et évalué auprès des enseignants n’ayant pas d’expériences antérieures en scénarisation pédagogique et n'ayant pas participer à la réalisation d’un EVAH. L’éditeur a été évalué notamment du point de vue de l’utilité et de l’utilisabilité. Les résultats obtenus permettent de confirmer que permet de concevoir des scénarios pédagogiques orientés RV aussi générique que possible et fournit tous les éléments nécessaires à la modélisation de telles situations pédagogiques. Les retours des enseignants-concepteurs ont particulièrement souligné sa simplicité d’utilisation et le bénéfice de pouvoir scénariser dans le monde virtuel.

International audience; Fractions are one of the most complex and challenging notions for children and can often lead to frustration and a revulsion for mathematics in general. In this article, we present the Magic Cauldron, a Mixed Reality (MR) application, designed to help children apprehend fractions in a fun and interactive way. The proposed solution is a digital extension to a board game, called the Potion Workshop that is used to introduce fractions in more than 2000 schools in France. We put together a team, composed of the mathematics didacticians who designed the Potion Workshop, several teachers who use this game in their class, a multimedia designer and computer scientists, in order to create a MR game that would tackle several of the key notions that are still hard to grasp. In this article, we present the Design-Based method followed by this team. It offers insights on how to implicate non-computer scientists in the design of complex custom MR interactions. Through several cycles of collaborative design, involving three teachers and their students and the development of three prototypes, this method allowed us to produce a truly original MR application.

International audience

International audience

International audience; The use of learning management systems gives rise to many difficulties for teachers and instructional designers in terms of designing their courses. These difficulties are mainly related to the operationalisation of pedagogical scenarios and the use of the corresponding tools, especially in a connectivist context. The work presented in this paper focuses on learning design models for massive open online course (MOOC) environments, and more specifically on assisting teachers in the design and implementation of pedagogical scenarios for connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs). The major contribution of this work is a visual authoring tool, based on business workflows for the design and deployment of cMOOC-oriented scenarios on the Moodle platform. The tool was also evaluated, primarily from the point of view of utility and usability. The findings confirm that our tool can provide all the elements needed to formalise and operationalise such courses on the Moodle platform

This transdisciplinary research seeks to analyze student behaviour in mutual aid situations, in the context of a virtual and remote laboratory for computer education. This study allows to identify different configurations of mutual aid, and reveals that students contribute homogeneously to chat sessions supported by a peer terminal consultation tool. It also shows that the task difficulty would impact the quality of the mutual aid sessions., Cette recherche transdisciplinaire vise à analyser les comportements des étudiants en situation d'entraide dans le cadre d’un laboratoire virtuel et distant pour l'apprentissage de l'informatique. Cette étude permet d’identifier différentes configurations d'entraide, et révèle que les étudiants contribuent de façon homogène aux sessions de chat supportées par un outil de consultation de terminal d'un pair. Elle montre également que la difficulté et le calibrage de la tâche impacteraient la qualité des sessions d'entraide.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have seen their numbers increase significantly since the democratization of the Internet. In addition, recently with the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend has intensified. If communication devices such as discussion forums are an integral part of the learning activities of MOOCs, there is still a lack of tools allowing instructors and researchers to guide and finely analyze the learning that takes place there. Dashboards summarizing students' activites are regularly offered to instructors, but they do not allow them to understand collective activities in the forums. From a socio-constructivist point of view, the exchanges and interactions sought by instructors in forums are essential for learning (Stephens, 2014). So far, studies have analyzed interactions in two ways: semantically but on a small scale or statistically and on a large scale but ignoring the quality of the interactions. The scientific contribution of this thesis relates to the proposal of an interactive detection approach of collective activities which takes into account their temporal, semantic and social dimensions. We seek to answer the problem of detecting and observing the collective dynamics that take place in MOOC forums. By collective dynamic, we mean all the qualitative and quantitative interactions of learners in the forums and their temporal changes. We want to allow instructors to intervene to encourage these activities favorable to learning. We rely on studies (Boroujeni 2017, Dascalu 2017) which propose to combine statistical analysis of interactions and automatic language processing to study the flow of information in forums. But, unlike previous studies, our approach is not limited to global or individual-centered analysis. We propose a method of designing indicators and dashboards allowing changes of scales and customization of views in order to support instructors and researchers in their task of detecting, observing and analyzing collective dynamics. To support our approach, we set up questionnaires and conducted semi-structured interviews with the instructors. As for the evaluation of the first indicators built at each iteration of our approach, we used various data sources and formats: Coursera (CSV), Hangout (JSON), Moodle (SQL).; Les formations à distance en ligne, en particulier les MOOC, voient leurs effectifs augmenter depuis la démocratisation d'Internet. Malgré leur popularité croissante ces cours manquent encore d'outils permettant aux instructeurs et aux chercheurs de guider et d'analyser finement les apprentissages qui s'y passent. Des tableaux de bord récapitulant l'activité des étudiants sont régulièrement proposés aux instructeurs, mais ils ne leur permettent pas d'appréhender les activités collectives, or du point vue socio-constructiviste, les échanges et les interactions que les instructeurs cherchent généralement dans les forums sont essentiels pour les apprentissages (Stephens, 2014). Jusqu'à présent, les études ont analysé les interactions soit sémantiquement mais à petite échelle, soit statistiquement et à grande échelle mais en ignorant la qualité des interactions. La proposition de cette thèse est une nouvelle approche de détection interactive des activités collectives qui prend en compte à la fois leurs dimensions temporelles, sémantiques et sociales. Nous cherchons un moyen de permettre aux instructeurs d'intervenir et d'encourager les dynamiques collectives qui sont favorables pour les apprentissages. Ce que nous entendons par "dynamique collective", c'est l'évolution des interactions à la fois qualitatives et quantitatives, des apprenants dans des forums. Nous nous appuyons sur des études (Boroujeni 2017, Dascalu 2017) qui proposent d'associer l'analyse statistique des interactions et le traitement automatique de la langue, pour étudier les flux d'informations dans les forums. Mais, à la différence des études précédentes, notre approche ne se limite pas à une analyse globale ou centrée sur un individu. Nous proposons une méthode de conception d’indicateurs et de tableaux de bord permettant les changements d'échelles et la personnalisation des vues afin de soutenir les instructeurs et les chercheurs dans leur tâche de détection, d'observation et d'analyse des dynamiques collectives de sous-groupes d'apprenants.

This article presents the lessons we learnt during the development of a generation component in the Escape it! learning game. They are presented according to the different development stages of the generator. They may be considered useful by designers or researchers sharing similar contexts and objectives.

International audience; In our study, we provide a state of the art on Mixed Reality (MR) learning tools for teaching math in primary and secondary school. Through a detailed analysis of eight representative applications, we provide an overview of the MR applications currently used, their educational objectives, the augmentations and interactions they offer, the technologies they use, their advantages and their limitations. We conclude by identifying several remaining challenges that need to be addressed in order to benefit from the full educational potential of MR for teaching math in schools.

International audience

RJC EIAH, organisée tous les deux ans, cette conférence francophone parrainée par l’ATIEF (Association des Technologies de l’Information pour l’Éducation et la Formation) a pour objectif la promotion de la recherche et la formation des étudiants chercheurs.; International audience; L'utilisation du numérique s'impose aujourd'hui dans quasiment tous les domaines. En utilisant les différents dispositifs, une masse importante de données est générée sur les activités des élèves. Ces données appelées communément "traces numériques" peuvent être volontaires ou involontaires. L'exploitation de ces traces prend de plus en plus d'ampleur grâce aux bénéfices qu'elles donnent aux analystes, aux concepteurs et aux utilisateurs. Nous menons un travail dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche qui vise principalement à exploiter des traces numériques issues de l'activité de collégiens générées à partir de leur utilisation d'outils et de services numériques mis à leur disposition dans des collèges. L'objectif est de produire des connaissances sur les usages scolaires et de proposer une architecture de tableaux de bord permettant de restituer des pratiques numériques des élèves à destination d'enseignants. Pour concevoir ces tableaux de bord, nous avons organisé des ateliers de conception participative avec des enseignants de collèges afin de collecter leurs besoins. Cet article va porter plus précisément sur l'analyse menée dans le cadre de ces ateliers. Les résultats de cette analyse nous permettent de penser les contours d'un premier dispositif de tableaux de bord destinés à des usages scolaires au niveau des collèges.

This PhD thesis lies at the crossroads of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and human motion learning fields. A lot of TEL systems for motion learning already exist, and they are used in numerous application domains. While efficient in the task they were designed for, they are usually ad-hoc by design, focusing on a specific task and learning context. Reusing such systems in other learning contexts is impossible or requires a heavy re-engineering process. The design of TEL systems for motion learning, expandable beyond the task they were created for and needing a minimal amount of re-engineering, represents a challenge from which arise several technical issues and scientific questions. To tackle these challenges, the Motion Learning Analytics (MLA) system was developed. This system was tested on throwing motions through three different experimentations, designed to test four aspects of the system : (i) the possibility to achieve a good separation of the motions into multiple groups orresponding to different throwing strategies, (ii), the possibility to achieve a good separation corresponding to the degree of success of these motions, (iii), the integration of the expert's observations needs as criteria for the separation and evaluation of the learner's progression and (iv), an analysis on the ability of the system to provide an efficient and relevant assistance to the expert in order to improve the learner's gesture.; Cette thèse s'inscrit à la croisée des domaines des Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain (EIAH) et de l'apprentissage du mouvement. Les EIAH utilisant le geste sont nombreux, et présents dans des domaines variés. Les EIAHs de la littérature sont le plus souvent conçus de façon ad-hoc ou se concentrent sur une tâche particulière dans un domaine d’apprentissage donné. Leur réutilisation dans d'autres situations d’apprentissage est souvent impossible ou nécessiterait un travail de réingénierie conséquent. Le développement d'EIAH support à l’enseignement de gestes, extensibles au-delà de la tâche pour laquelle elles ont été conçues et ayant un coût minimal en termes de réingénierie, représente un défi qui pose plusieurs verrous techniques et questions scientifiques. Afin de répondre à ces questions, le système Motion Learning Analytics (MLA) a été développé. Ce système permet la captation, le filtrage, le traitement et l'analyse automatique et semi-supervisée du mouvement d'un apprenant. Ce système a été testé, sur des gestes de lancers, au travers de trois expérimentations, permettant d’évaluer quatre facettes du système proposé et fondé sur des propriétés cinématiques et géométriques du mouvement: (i) la possibilité d'obtenir une séparation des gestes en différents groupes correspondant à plusieurs stratégies de lancers, (ii) la possibilité d'obtenir une séparation en fonction de la réussite ou non de ces gestes, (iii) l’intégration des besoins d’observation de l’enseignant, en tant que critères de séparation des gestes et d’évaluation de la progression de l’apprenant et enfin, (iv) une analyse de la capacité du système à fournir une aide à la décision pertinente pour un expert, dans l'objectif d'améliorer le geste de l'apprenant.

International audience; The keycube is a tangible cubic device including a text entry interface for different apparatuses such as augmented, mixed or virtual reality headsets, as well as smart TVs, desktop computers, laptops, tablets. The keycube comprises 80 keys equally disposed on 5 faces. In this paper we investigate keycube text entry performances and the potential typing skill transfer from traditional keyboard. Using prototype implementations, we conducted a user study comparing different cubic layouts and included a baseline from traditional keyboards. Experiments show that users are able to attain about 19 words per minute within one hundred minutes of practice with a QWERTY-based cubic layout, more than twice the speed of an unknown-based cubic layout with similar error rate, and about 30% of their speed with a traditional keyboard.

(Scimago Q1); International audience; The expansion of mobile devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones) and their educational and recreational applications have contributed to the emergence of Mobile Learning Games (MLGs). MLGs show great potential for increasing engagement, creativity and authentic learning. Yet, despite their great potential for education, the use of MLGs by teachers, remains very limited. This is partly due to the fact that MLGs are often designed to match a specific learning context, and thus cannot be directly reused in other situations. In addition, the existing authoring tools are either simple to use but do not offer enough features for designing MLGs that meet the teachers’ needs, or much too complex to be used without programming skills. To tackle these problems, we propose JEM Inventor, a MLG authoring tool, based on a nested design approach, progressively revealing functionalities, depending on users' skills and needs. JEM Inventor and its nested design model were evaluated through two experimentations with more than twenty teachers, from a wide range of fields and expertise with the use of MLGs. We also conducted field experimentations with more than 1500 students in order to evaluate the quality of the MLGs created with JEM Inventor as well as their impact on learners.

(Scimago Q1); International audience; The work presented in this paper examines part of a broader issue in the field of technology-enhanced learning and focused on Massive Open Online Courses environments (MOOC). The main goal is to provide an approach, models and tools to assist teachers in the scenario design process and the operationalization of pedagogical scenarios in a connectivist MOOC context. The major contribution of this work is the MOOC Authoring Tool (MOOCAT), which is a visual authoring tool that is intended for the design and deployment of cMOOC-oriented scenarios. MOOCAT has two main innovative features. The first feature offers a tool for designing educational scenarios in a simple way, through a graphical representation for defining learning workflow. The second feature is related to its capacity to bridge the gap between the design phase and its execution in different Learning Management Systems (LMS), by offering services that allow the automatic deployment of pedagogical scenarios to existing LMS. This paper presents the underlying model of MOOCAT, and describes the cMOOC scenario-building process. The tool was evaluated primarily from the point of view of utility and usability. A total of 40 individuals have participated in the experimentation. The findings confirm that MOOCAT can be used to design connectivist pedagogical scenarios and can provide all the necessary elements for the design of such courses. Feedback from participants emphasized the ease of use and the benefits of the proposed visual authoring tool.

Working with changing and vague/incomplete requirements is a challenging issue in Model Driven Engineering. Well known principles have been proposed to deal with the former case and reduce the effort required to implement a change. The second case requires managing uncertainty while expressing models and model transformations. Few research works have been proposed to express and manage models with uncertainty. However, uncertainty management in the model transformation itself remains a research gap. Hence, this paper introduces the notion of partial pattern which underpins the expression of uncertain model transformations. As part of the proposal, a transformation infrastructure that supports the execution of uncertain transformations is presented. Also, results of an evaluation of scalability are given. The performed experiments make use of application cases extracted from the Escape it! serious game. This is a learning game which intends to help autistic children reinforce and generalize visual skills.

International audience; Learning Games (LGs) have proven to be effective in a large variety of academic fields and for all levels; from kindergarten to professional training. They are therefore very valuable learning resources that should be shared and reused. However, the lack of catalogues that allow teachers to find existing LGs is a significant obstacle to their use in class. It is difficult for catalogues, or any type of search engine, to index LGs because they are poorly referenced. Yet, many researches have proposed elaborate metadata models for LGs. However, all these models are extensions of LOM, a metadata model that is widely used for referencing learning resources, but that contains more than 60 fields, of which more than half are irrelevant to LGs. The gap between these models and the information that game designers are willing to provide is huge. In this paper, we analyze the LG metadata models proposed in previous research to detect the fields that are specific to LGs and the fields that are irrelevant to LGs. We then propose LGMD (Learning Games Metadata Definition), an optimal lightweight metadata model that only contains the important information for LG indexing. LGMD reduces by two thirds the number of fields compared to the previous models. We confronted this model with the information actually provided by LG editors , by analyzing 736 LG page descriptions found online. This study shows that LGMD covers all the information provided by the LG editors.

International audience; The development of pedagogies that can provide alternatives to traditional approaches is becoming increasingly important as a means of enhancing the attractiveness of training courses, appealing to new types of learners and designing learning systems that help to develop multidisciplinary skills. In this context, the JEN.lab project aims to offer innovative perspectives for learning based on the design of digital epistemic games (JENs in French). The research effort presented in this paper is part of the JEN.lab project. We aim to study problems related to the modelling and design of digital epistemic games. We propose a co-design process and an assistant tool supporting this process to guide teachers in designing digital epistemic games called ADDEGames (Assistance Design tool for Digital Epistemic Games). Our approach is based on: (i) the learners and the situation that emerges when they play the game, rather than the device used to play; and (ii) the teachers who want to manage a game-based learning situation. The iterative and participative development process and acceptance test using an agile approach are presented.

(Scimago Q4); International audience; Received: Accepted: The use of Learning Games (LGs) in schools is a success factor for students. The benefits they bring to the learning process should be widely disseminated at all levels of education. Currently, there are thousands of LGs that cover a large variety of educations fields. Despite this large choice of LGs, very few are used by teachers, due to the difficulty of finding and selecting suitable LGs. The aim of this paper is to propose an extraction model that will automatically collect the information about LGs directly from their web pages, in order to index them in a catalogue. The proposed ADEM (Automatic Description Extraction Model), browses the web pages describing LGs and does a first cleaning to remove any unnecessary information. Then a detection of description blocks, based on a certain number of criteria, identifies the regions containing the LG description text. Finally, an indexing on specific fields is performed. ADEM made it possible to automatically process 785 web pages to extract LG metadata indexing information. The results of this extraction process were validated by 20 teachers. This model therefore offers a promising starting point for better LG indexing and the creation of a complete catalogue.

(CORE B); International audience; This paper discusses the usability of a generic method for the evaluation of the user activity in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and its implementation with Unity. In the context of motion-based tasks, the learning process relies on the observation and imitation of the task demonstrated by the teacher. The learner task is compared to the teacher one in terms of: (a) motions shape of the user and the manipulated artefacts and (b), the sequential order of 3D checkpoints that the user must collide with. The integration of the evaluation system into any existing VLE rises challenges regarding the system architecture and the Human Computer Interface to set up the evaluation process. A usability test related to the design of this process is conducted for a pool shooting, a dart throwing and a letter writing simulation. The preliminary results show that: (i) the integration of an existing VLE into the evaluation system is feasible despite issues related to the interaction assets and (ii), all participants are satisfied by their designed evaluation process for pool shooting and dart throwing, they were unable to set up a satisfying evaluation for letter writing due to scale issues.

International audience; Digital catalogues must be intuitive and easy to use. However, designing their interfaces is a complex task because there is so much available information and such little space. The choice of search filters, their format, their position, including the way to represent the results, are not trivial decisions. This paper presents the User-Driven Interface Design (UDID) method that offers five steps with specific material to help end users produce mock-up interfaces for digital catalogues. This method recommends letting participants compose their interfaces according to their needs. In this article, we present how the UDID method offered several befits for designing the interface of a Learning Game catalogue. 17 participants followed this method to produce five mock-up interfaces that we then analysed and compared to create the final interface.

(Scimago Q2, ATIEF B); International audience; Background. Many learning environments are quickly deserted by learners, even if they are efficient. Gamification of learning environments is a recent approach used to enhance learners' motivation and participation. Aim. One issue with this approach is that people have various expectations and react differently faced with specific game mechanics. So, an important goal lies in automatically adapting game mechanics according to player types. In this paper, we study the gaming features that can be adapted in learning environments and the player model that can be used for the adaptation process. We propose an approach that aims to predict to which game mechanics a user is responsive, and to adapt the gaming features of the system according to this information. Methodology. An implementation was released, and evaluated through an exploratory study with 59 middle school students, each one using the learning environment during three 45-minutes sessions. Results. The results validate the implementation of the system and show that the users' activity can help to predict their profile. The adaptation process did not improve learners' engagement as expected, but it shows a path for future research toward an adaptive approach for learning environment gamification.

Purpose Smart eyewear, such as augmented or virtual reality headset, allows the projection of virtual content through a display worn on the user’s head. This paper aims to present a mobile platform, named “CARTON”, which transforms a smartphone into smart eyewear, following a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach. This platform is composed of three main components: a blueprint to build the hardware prototype with very simple materials and regular tools; a software development kit (SDK) to help with the development of new applications (e.g. augmented reality app); and, finally, a second SDK (ControlWear) to interact with mobile applications through a Smartwatch. Design/methodology/approach User experiments were conducted, in which participants were asked to create, by themselves, the CARTON’s hardware part and perform usability tests with their own creation. A second round of experimentation was conducted to evaluate three different interaction modalities. Findings Qualitative user feedback and quantitative results prove that CARTON is functional and feasible to anyone, without specific skills. The results also showed that ControlWear had the most positive results, compared with the other interaction modalities, and that user interaction preference would vary depending on the task. Originality/value The authors describe a novel way to create a smart eyewear available for a wide audience around the world. By providing everything open-source and open-hardware, they intend to solve the reachability of technologies related to smart eyewear and aim to accelerate research around it.

The GraphiT project aims to help teachers in specifying of pedagogically sound learning scenarios that can be executed for automatically setting-up the related Learning Management System course. We intend to provide teachers with LMS-specific instructional design languages and editors. To achieve this goal, we have to raise the LMS semantics in order to enrich the pedagogical expressiveness of the produced models. We propose a specific LMScentered approach for abstracting the low-level concepts and turning these semantics into higher-level pedagogical building blocks. We present and illustrate our propositions focused on the Moodle LMS., Le projet GraphiT vise à aider les enseignants à spécifier des scénarios pédagogiques pertinents qui puissent être opérationnalisés en tant que cours sur un Learning Management System cible. Nous nous intéressons à l’abstraction des aspects opérationnalisation afin de mettre l’accent sur la dimension spécification de la scénarisation. Nous proposons une approche centrée Moodle pour abstraire les usages des fonctionnalités du LMS et spécifier des briques de conception pédagogique de plus haut-niveaux. Nous proposons un langage et un éditeur de scénarisation pédagogique graphique., Loiseau Esteban, Laforcade Pierre, El mawas Nour, Iksal Sébastien. Abstraction des fonctionnalités d'une plateforme de formation pour la mise en oeuvre de langages de scénarisation. In: Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication pour l'Éducation et la Formation, volume 24 n°1, 2017. Sélection de la conférence EIAH 2015, sous la direction de Gaëlle Molinari et Lahcen Oubahssi. pp. 75-105.

International audience; Students and schools are increasingly equipped with smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices can enhance teaching in many ways. Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) for example, have shown great potential for increasing student's motivation and improving the quality of situated learning. For the past few years, the research community has been working on authoring tools that allow teachers to create and distribute their own MLGs. The development of these authoring tools is challenging and time consuming and even more so if the objective is for these tools to actually be used in classrooms. The Design-Based Research (DBR) paradigm was precisely developed to address these central issues of Technology Enhanced Learning. It involves co-designing and testing with end-users from the beginning of the project. Although DBR increases the acceptance of new educational tools, it also adds several challenges, including the complexity of involving teachers and students in real-world situations and creating several versions of the tools that will be improved iteratively. In this paper, we aim at providing design principles and practical guidance on the way to develop such authoring tools, based on our experience. We conclude on lessons learned from this project and discuss some systematic issues we faced.

International audience; Identification and mapping of trees through a Geo Collaborative Inventory (GCI) platform is an important task for research in botany, citizen sciences and education. The quantity and veracity of the recorded data rely mainly on the motivation and engagement of each participant. However, for a non botanist, tree mapping can be perceived as an unstructured and tedious task that requires advanced skills. In addition, existing GCI applications deliver poor or nonexistent feedbacks regarding identification and mapping skills as well as progression in these skills. Structuring GCI sessions and enhancing them with game mechanics and clear objectives may have a positive effect on the inventory quality. Inventory situations being highly context dependant, a descriptive model of the GCI task is required to create adapted activity scenarios usable in various situations. This paper presents Albiziapp: a web collaborative and mobile tool, based on OpenSteetMap, that operationalizes any gamified scenario, consistent with a descriptive model built from a structural analysis of the GCI task.

International audience

International audience; We learn and/or relearn motor skills at all ages. Feedback plays a crucial role in this learning process, and Virtual Reality (VR) constitutes a unique tool to provide feedback and improve motor learning. In particular, VR grants the possibility to edit 3D movements and display augmented feedback in real time. Here we combined VR and motion capture to provide learners with a 3D feedback superimposing in real time the reference movements of an expert (expert feedback) to the movements of the learner (self feedback). We assessed the effectiveness of this feedback for the learning of a throwing movement in American football. This feedback was used during (concurrent feedback) and/or after movement execution (delayed feedback), and it was compared with a feedback displaying only the reference movements of the expert. In contrast with more traditional studies relying on video feedback, we used the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm coupled to motion capture to measure the spatial characteristics of the movements. We also assessed the regularity with which the learner reproduced the reference movement along its path. For that, we used a new metric computing the dispersion of distance around the mean distance over time. Our results show that when the movements of the expert were superimposed on the movements of the learner during learning (i.e., self + expert), the reproduction of the reference movement improved significantly. Furthermore, providing feedback about the movements of the expert only did not give rise to any significant improvement regarding movement reproduction.

International audience; The evaluation of text complexity is an important topic in education. While this objective has been addressed by approaches using lexical and syntactic analysis for decades, semantic complexity is less common, and the recent research works that tackle this question rely on machine learning algorithms that are hardly explainable and are not specifically designed to measure this variable. To address this issue, we explore in this paper the engineering of novel features to evaluate conceptual complexity. Through the construction of a knowledge graph that captures the concepts present in a text and their generalized forms, we measure different graph-based metrics to express such a complexity. Eventually , early-stage evaluations based on a well-known public corpus of students' productions show that the use of these metrics significantly improves performance compared to a state-of-the-art binary neural network classifier.

National audience; The ability to deal with one’s emotions in professional situations that involve human relations is generally taught with role playing. However, role playing is expensive (comedians) or difficult to set up if the students are play-ing a role that is not theirs yet. In order to improve the training offered to Edu-cation Counselors (ECs), we propose the TGRIS virtual reality simulator, that allows ECs to naturally discuss with a virtual novice teacher (i.e. simulated by an embodied conversational agent). This tool has the particularity of using ex-changes extracted from real problematic counselling situations. In addition, the verbal and non-verbal responses as well as the emotional state of the virtual novice teachers are piloted by the teacher. This research explores how this sys-tem allows ECs to learn how to dialogue with novice teachers who resist to their help. The experimentation lead with 12 ECs shows the potential of instru-mented training with TGRIS.; Se former à la gestion des émotions dans les métiers de l'humain passe généralement par des jeux de rôle. Il est difficile de systématiser ce pro-cédé car il est coûteux (comédiens) où difficile à mettre en place si les étudiants jouent un rôle en devenir pour eux. Pour la formation de conseillers pédago-giques de l'enseignement (CP), nous proposons TGRIS, un outil de simulation d'entretien, en Réalité Virtuelle, qui permet aux CP de discuter naturellement avec un enseignant débutant virtuel (i.e. simulé par un agent conversationnel animé). Cet outil présente la particularité d'utiliser des échanges prélevés en situation réelle d'entretien de conseil problématique. De plus, les réactions ver-bales, non-verbales et l'état émotionnel de l'enseignant débutant virtuel sont pi-lotées par le formateur. La recherche explore comment ce système permet aux CP d'apprendre à dialoguer avec un enseignant débutant qui résiste au conseil. L'expérimentation avec 12 CP montre le potentiel d'un dispositif de formation instrumenté avec TGRIS. Mots-clés. Simulateur, formation, émotion, réalité virtuelle, outil auteur, agent conversationnel animé

National audience; Nous proposons dans cet article les premières étapes de l'établissement d'un canevas méthodologique permettant d'assister les acteurs de l'instrumentation de situations pédagogiques à l'aide d'outils reposant sur des technologies innovantes. Afin d'atteindre cet objectif, il a été entrepris une modélisation des différentes parties prenantes ainsi que l'environnement dans lequel s'inscrit cette instrumentation, dans ses dimensions organisationnelles et matérielles. Nous présentons le contexte de la genèse de ce modèle : l'instrumentation par un environnement outillé basé sur la transcription de la parole en direct, ainsi que d'autres technologies à l'état de prototypes de recherche. Abstract. This article presents the first steps in building a methodological framework aiming to assist contributors instrumenting pedagogical situations using tools based on innovative technologies. This framework ought to be used in various possible situations. This variety is described by a model of various stakeholders and the environment where the process is taking place, considering organizational or equipment constraints. Furthermore, we present the context leading to the creation of this model: instrumentation using a toolset based on synchronous speech transcription among other technologies in the research prototype stage.

National audience

As part of a collaborative design-based research project, flipped classroom training in a videoconferencing context was given twice to teachers. The pedagogical design of this training was structured in a framework based on the creation of a learning community, the learning presence and the real experience as a learner of a flipped classroom experience in a videoconferencing context. Following the first iteration, empirical findings, from the point of view of learning, as well as the activity of the instructors or the technopedagogical features implemented, led to the development of a first research project aimed at describing the presence created within this community, according to the learning presence model [11]. This work helped to highlight a certain lack of socio-cognitive presence and to raise questions about the pedagogical presence., Dans notre projet de recherche collaborative orientée par la conception, une formation sur la classe inversée en contexte de visioconférence a été donnée à deux reprises à des enseignants et conseillers pédagogiques. Le design pédagogique de cette formation se structurait dans un cadre misant sur la création d'une communauté d'apprentissage, la présence à distance et le vécu en tant qu'apprenant d'une expérience de classe inversée en contexte de visioconférence. Suite à la première itération, des constats empiriques, tant du point de vue de l'apprentissage, que de l'activité des formateurs ou des caractéristiques technopédagogiques mises en oeuvre, ont motivé l'élaboration d'un premier travail de recherche visant à décrire la présence suscitée au sein de cette communauté, selon le modèle de la présence à distance [11]. Ce travail a notamment permis de mettre en évidence une certaine carence en matière de présence sociocognitive et de soulever des questions sur la présence pédagogique.

International audience; Alternate realities through headsets, such as augmented, mixed and virtual reality are becoming part of people's everyday life. Except in some limited context, usual keyboards are inappropriate for such technological medium and alternative interfaces for text-entry must be explored. In this paper we present the keycube, a general-purpose cubic handheld device that goes beyond the text-entry interface by including multiple keys, a touch-screen, an inertial unit with six degrees-of-freedom and a vibrotactile feedback. Strong of its form factor and affordance, the keycube offers advantages with regards to mobility, comfort, learnability, privacy and playfulness. Thus, the combination creates a novel text-entry interface convenient for many use cases across the whole reality-virtuality continuum.

International audience; This paper presents a tool designed to assist a virtual reality learner in a vocational training context. The benefits of VR are spreading outside the video-games and research field, leading the vocational education institutions to consider using this technology for training purposes. By simulating emblematic professional situations, teachers can train students in good conditions regarding safety, logistics and financial resources. In the French vocational training system, VR is just at its beginnings and the lack of experiments with this training context highlighted the need for new tools allowing teachers to use VR with their students. The work presented in this paper is part of a global project aiming to create, design and assess new VR tools and methodologies for this specific context. In order to guide, inform and assist the user, we are presenting a generic tool that can ease VR sessions by proposing embedded tools within easy reach of the immersed user, such as a camera, an inventory, a printer or stock management. This tool is a virtual tablet that can be grabbed by the immersed user allowing her/him to interact efficiently with the virtual environment.

This paper presents an authoring tool in the cMOOC context called MOOCAT (MOOC Authoring Tool). It is a visual authoring tool that helps teachers to design cMOOC-oriented pedagogical scenarios. MOOCAT has two main innovative features. The first is that it offers a tool for conceiving pedagogical scenarios in a simple way through graphical representation, by providing the functionality to design learning workflows. The second is related to its capacity to bridge the gap between the conception phase and its execution into different LMS (Learning Management System), by offering services that allow the automatic deployment of pedagogical scenarios to existing platforms (e.g. OpenEDX, Moodle, etc.). This facilitates the authoring process considerably, and enhances the ability of teachers to concentrate their efforts on the content. This paper presents the model underlying MOOCAT, and describes the cMOOC scenario-building process. Also, the paper highlights the findings from a case study which was organized in order to evaluate the utility and the usability of the tool, and the usefulness of its innovative feature of conceiving and deploying a cMOOC scenario into OpenEDX platform. MOOCAT seems to be an easy-to-use tool, which offers guidance and flexibility during the design process.