UTL-CL : A Declarative Calculation Language Proposal for a Learning Tracks Analysis Process Diem Pham Thi Ngoc 1 , Sébastien Iksal 1 , Christophe Choquet 1 , Evelyne Klinger 2 1 University of Maine – LIUM IUT de Laval – Dépt. SRC 52 rue des Docteurs Calmette et Guérin 53020 LAVAL - FRANCE FirstName.LastName@univ-lemans.fr 2 Arts et Metiers ParisTech- LAMPA Equipe Presence et Innovation – Entité HIT 4 rue de l'Ermitage 53000 LAVAL - FRANCE evelyne.klinger@angers.ensam.fr Abstract In this paper, we propose a track analysis process about the activity in learning systems that helps teachers to benefit of the experience and the knowledge of the community in the usage analysis. We also propose a language for calculation of teachers' observation needs. This language will be implemented in tracks' analysis tools, which support teachers to establish their tracking needs in order to improve the pedagogical scenario that they designed. 1. Introduction One of the actual bottlenecks of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems engineering is the support of tracks analysis for three purposes: (1) adaptivity, e.g. allowing the system to adapt itself dynamically, (2) adaptability, e.g. allowing the learners and the tutors to adapt the system during a learning session, and (3) reengineering, e.g. allowing the designers to modify the system after a learning session. With this in mind, the REDiM (model driven re-engineering) project adopts a model driven engineering (MDE) approach for the instructional design where the predictive pedagogical scenario is composed by two woven models: the formal description of the sequence of the activities that learners and tutors have to perform and the modeling of the observation needs, in terms of significant indicators which are able to help to understand the effective activities performed during a learning session. In this framework, REDiM has focused on the design and the reengineering of such predictive scenarios: how a designer could be helped (1) for modeling a predictive scenario, including indicators, and (2) for analyzing these indicators after a learning session, in order to modify the predictive scenario for the next session. This is the way we have proposed the Usage Tracking Language (UTL) [1], a meta- language dedicated to the modeling of indicators, woven with the activities modeling, inside the predictive pedagogical scenario. Each indicator is formally described as the result of several transformations, combinations and abstractions of raw data collected during the learning session. The purpose of this paper is to present a part of this language, called UTL-CL (UTL Calculation Language), our proposal to formalize the method of calculation of an indicator from raw data. This proposal is a step towards the definition of Design Patterns for indicators, where the problem is how to get an indicator from raw data and where the solution is the relative calculation method. The next section of this paper shapes the context of this research. The third section defines the specific tracks analysis process we propose. The fourth section is focused on the description of UTL-CL with 2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies 978-0-7695-3711-5/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2009.37 681