**2. Theoretical foundation of micro-instructional design**

The instrument is defined as an intermediate entity situated between two other entities which are the subject, actor and user of the instrument and the object on which the action is performed. This instrument can be called a pedagogical instrument if there is pedagogical intent behind its use.

A pedagogical instrument is defined as being any entity (symbolic or not), capable of operationalizing an action of the system. This entity can be used, reused or referred to in the course of a didactic activity in order to carry out a task with an underlying pedagogical intent.

According to the instrumental approach Rabardel [6], the instrument is composite; it contains components from artefact and components from users' utilization schemes. The artefact part comes from the designer and from his/her anticipation as to the future use of the artefact. The users' utilization schemes part comes from the subject's involvement in the completed activity. Thus the instrument is not only part of the world which is external to the subject but also the result of the subject's personal involvement in the action.

When we look at instrumental approach from the computer science perspective, we find that schemes of use are not prescribed but dynamically constructed by user during the process of the utilization of the tool. In our approach, instrument would thus be an object (within oriented object paradigm) which includes an artefact part (as properties of the object) and a scheme components part representing all possible prescribed uses of the tool (as methods representing its scheme of use called in our case scenario of use).

The design of the learning activity means the specification of the nature of this mediation by the design of different instructional material layers. The instructional designer should specify the elements used for modelling each layer of pedagogical instrument (**Figure 1**) to be constructed by other actors (the pedagogical and didactic layer, the cognitive layer, the knowledge objects model and the interface layer).

The pedagogical instrument is characterized by five criteria corresponding to its different roles (**Figure 1**):


global learning systems that focus on engaging learners in two main processes: knowledge

In fact, this definition let us think that instructional engineering is a particular case of knowledge engineering applied in education domain. Instructional engineering should present tools offering multi-views of instructional material models. Micro ID (Instructional Design) has to integrate these perspectives by the principles of divide and conquers. The designer should differentiate clearly the features of the instructional materials and its contents (with all models being able to represent the various aspects of the instructional material). The outcome of the presented approach should be the convergence of cognitive, didactic, interface and content designs. Our proposition is focused jointly on the innovative and routine designs. The innovative micro-components of the pedagogical instruments are designed to be used and reused within the principles of an object-oriented paradigm. Our approach is intended to renew ID methodology to support the creation of reusable artificial objects for learning systems in order to

The purpose of this work is to present a new current of learning activity design based on activity theory where its design means the specification of its specific teaching materials called pedagogical instruments; this material has the role of mediator between the learner and the objects presented in the activity. Vygotsky [2] proposed a point of view based on the subject-object-artefact triangle. The main problem is to know how learners interact with content using mediating artefacts (pedagogical instrument). All the higher psychological pro-

In reality, the application of activity theory to ID is not new; Jonassen and Rohrer-Murphy [19] have taken up and applied activity theory to the domain of ID. This theory has now spread and is applied to many educational domains [3–5] (Schmitz, 2010; Levy, 2008). All these works are applying activity theory for modelling the learning activity without taking into account ICT constraints. The micro-design shows how to represent and use artefact and instrument in the context of e-learning. Research in activity theory was continued in another way according to the instrumental approach called the psychological approach to education by Rabardel [6] in which he proposes to specify the instrument as something constructed by the user during interaction. We will review Rabardel's [6] work in what follows and make a theoretical comparison with our own specification of the pedagogical instrument according to what we call micro ID.

The instrument is defined as an intermediate entity situated between two other entities which are the subject, actor and user of the instrument and the object on which the action is performed. This instrument can be called a pedagogical instrument if there is pedagogical intent

A pedagogical instrument is defined as being any entity (symbolic or not), capable of operationalizing an action of the system. This entity can be used, reused or referred to in the course of a didactic activity in order to carry out a task with an underlying pedagogical intent.

**2. Theoretical foundation of micro-instructional design**

extraction and knowledge dissemination.

92 Active Learning - Beyond the Future

operationalise the theoretical foundations.

cesses are mediated through a tool.

behind its use.


The problem of e-learning design is that knowledge is of different kinds. Consequently, a single person cannot manipulate precise knowledge in all domains. The main role of the team is to allow the learner's knowledge to progress according to his/her preferences, the identification of the knowledge actually used by the learner, how to manage and activate certain learner strategies and the translation of the collected results in terms of the effectiveness of the techniques used. The issue at stake is the "divide and conquer" principle which makes teamwork an absolute requirement. The various actors involved in the design process are:

• *The instructional designer*: he/she defines the general characteristics of the pedagogical instrument; his/her role is to specify the shells for the other specialists to integrate the various standard specifications.

• *The learning domain theoretician*: his/her role is concerned with the specifications of each knowledge object and its micro-components within his/her domain of work. In the learning to read domain, this actor is the linguist (various sub-fields: semantics, psycholinguistics) who specifies the knowledge object of this domain (letter, sentences, texts, etc.).

• *Finally ontological engineer*: he/she should have a high level of technical ability in order to be able to manage the knowledge projects and dialogue with all the design actors. Ontological engineering play fundamental roles in understanding artefacts by computer, through providing more structural knowledge for using formal models expressed in languages with computational semantics [7, 8]. In reality, whereas we are looking at this from the research

Innovative Approach for Renewing Instructional Design Applied in the Context of e-Learning

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.82246

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The divide principle is based on the projection technique to have a multi-view of the pedagogical instrument. That means to create more elaborate models for pedagogical instrument taking into account all aspects of acquisition of knowledge by the learner. The conquer principle is done by connecting theses different models for individualizing learning activity. These models can be described in terms of four projections (**Figure 2**): (1) content projection model, (2) a pedagogical and didactic projection model, (3) a cognitive projection model and (4) a delivery model describing the interface projection of each pedagogical instrument. The realization of these models needs to share pluridisciplinary knowledge between the various

The entities manipulated and adopted in the pedagogical model have progressive degree of smoothness (macro-, meso- and microscale); the entities presented in macroscale are the objective units, these entities are the objective units which can be represented in the form of couples of information: <action; knowledge unit>; or triplets: <action; status of learner's knowledge; knowledge unit>. The objective units represent the properties part of the learning object. For example, in the learning to read domain the following are valid information couples <Make acquire; sentence limits> or <verify; Known; word>. In the mesoscale, we use classes of didactic situation. The entities represented in the microscale are the individualizing elements of the instantiated didactic situation which is considered as a learning object.

By instantiating parameters of the contents, words will be instantiated. These couples and triplets are used to report the progress in the state of the learner's knowledge of reading but with the hypothesis that this takes into account the different pedagogical factors and policies used within a learning theory (our case is concerned with activity theory). Consequently this model is defined to provide to our system the possibility to adapt the pedagogical behaviour to a specific student. From this point of view, the choice of pedagogical actions with respect to

We distinguish between the model of use of the interface which is a sub-model of the cognitive model and the interface model. The model of use of the interface can be considered as a set of functions that allows communication and finalizes the form by which the system transmits information. The use of the artefact associated with the instrument is interpreted by a logic implemented by the learner to be more familiar with the instrument (**Figure 1**). This process is called instrumentation of the learner [6]. Know that learning is defined as

standpoint, many actors of the design process can wear several caps.

design actors to arrive at the specification of the pedagogical instrument.

**2.1. Pedagogical projection model**

learning strategies will be more adaptive.

**2.2. Interface projection model**


**Figure 1.** Pedagogical instrument structure.

• *Finally ontological engineer*: he/she should have a high level of technical ability in order to be able to manage the knowledge projects and dialogue with all the design actors. Ontological engineering play fundamental roles in understanding artefacts by computer, through providing more structural knowledge for using formal models expressed in languages with computational semantics [7, 8]. In reality, whereas we are looking at this from the research standpoint, many actors of the design process can wear several caps.

The divide principle is based on the projection technique to have a multi-view of the pedagogical instrument. That means to create more elaborate models for pedagogical instrument taking into account all aspects of acquisition of knowledge by the learner. The conquer principle is done by connecting theses different models for individualizing learning activity. These models can be described in terms of four projections (**Figure 2**): (1) content projection model, (2) a pedagogical and didactic projection model, (3) a cognitive projection model and (4) a delivery model describing the interface projection of each pedagogical instrument. The realization of these models needs to share pluridisciplinary knowledge between the various design actors to arrive at the specification of the pedagogical instrument.
