Metadata modelling disciplines for e-learning by doing systems

This paper introduces an ontological representation of a discipline in general particularly adapted for the case of learning-by-doing purposes. Our main objective is to propose an ontology (concepts, relations, functions and rules) that describes a discipline. The meta model introduced here shows two points of views for a domain: the specification view given by the ontology and the resources view that shows pedagogical content in different forms such as documents, simulations, podcasts etc. The domain specification knowledge is used for resources retrieval or for any other learning/teaching activity. Today with the evolution of semantic web to linked data, the proposed metadata can be a way to connect the educational resources of a discipline over the web. The experiments conducted with three computer science disciplines show that the proposed meta model can be generalised to any other domain and is adaptable to develop software tools with complex learning activities.