=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3316/poster-paper4
|storemode=property
|title=Model-driven Design and Management of Professional Education Programmes
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3316/poster-paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-3316
|authors=Dennis Wolters,Gregor Engels
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icsob/WoltersE22
}}
==Model-driven Design and Management of Professional Education Programmes==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3316/poster-paper4.pdf
Model-driven Design and Management of
Professional Education Programmes
Dennis Wolters1,* , Gregor Engels1
1
Department of Computer Science, Paderborn University, Germany
Abstract
Digital transformation requires professional education programmes to help understand new business
technologies and foster innovative thinking. This paper proposes a model-driven approach for designing
and managing professional education programmes across all life cycle phases. As part of this, we present
a visual notation for the analysis and design phase to describe dependencies and the temporal structure
of those programmes. Furthermore, our approach allows the explicit linkage of processes to design
and manage a programme to the model describing it. Web-based tool support is built on top of the
collaborative online whiteboard Miro and by integrating with the project management tool OpenProject.
Keywords
professional education, model-driven development, instructional design
1. Motivation
Professional education programmes are essential for digital transformation as they help un-
derstand new business technology and foster innovative thinking. Furthermore, they play a
significant role in developing, attracting and retaining talent [1]. Bespoke professional education
programmes are needed to target a company’s needs adequately. Such bespoke programmes
are created in close cooperation with client companies and contributing educators. Programme
designers and managers have to plan and coordinate the processes steering this collaboration,
which, nowadays, often has to happen remotely. Models representing such programmes are
well-suited as mediating artefacts in such collaborations [2]. Modelling languages often focus
on specific phases and neglect the process perspective. For instance, approaches like MyScript-
ing [3], STOPS [4] and CIAT [5] focus on programme development, but the process perspective
is out of scope. The instructional engineering approach MISA [6] covers the process perspective
by defining its own design process. However, MISA does not assist in process enactment and
the flexibility to use other processes is limited.
The awareness of the problem that processes are managed separately from designing and
running a professional education programme led to a start of a design science research cycle [7].
This extended abstract provides an overview of our suggested model-driven approach that
couples professional education programme design and process management. In contrast to
other approaches, we model such programmes on a high level of abstraction across their entire
ICSOB’22: 13th International Conference on Software Business, November 8-–11, 2022, Bolzano, Italy
*
Corresponding author.
dennis.wolters@uni-paderborn.de (D. Wolters); engels@uni-paderborn.de (G. Engels)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
life cycle. We leave the option to use existing approaches and tools for detailed planning.
Furthermore, our approach assists in enacting design and management processes without
prescribing specific processes. Web-based tool support based on the online whiteboard Miro
enables the use of our approach in collaborative remote settings. Section 2 gives an overview of
our approach. Section 3 provides details on tool support, and Section 4 concludes the paper and
gives an outlook on future work.
2. Modelling Professional Education Programmes
The basis for our model-driven approach to design and manage professional education pro-
grammes is a modelling language that can describe such programmes across their entire life
cycle. As depicted in Figure 1.a, the metamodel of our Professional Education Programme
Modelling Language (PEPML) is subdivided into several packages. The Foundation package
defines concepts required by all packages, such as versions, iterations and a base class for all
programme entities. Five additional packages are named after the instructional design process
ADDIE [8] that covers all life-cycle phases of education programmes, i.e. Analysis, Design,
Development, Implementation and Evaluation. Each of these packages contains concepts for
the respective phases. The Enactment package provides support for enacting processes that
relate to a programme. Structuring the metamodel based on ADDIE is solely done to provide a
more transparent (internal) structure, and the Enactment package does not require following an
ADDIE-based process. For instance, programmes designers can use our approach in combination
with an agile instructional design process such as the Successive Approximation Model [9]. In
that case, concepts of the different packages are utilised as needed by the design process.
PEPML supports two viewpoints (see Figure 1.b): (1) The dependency viewpoint covers the
interrelation between the different entities of an education programme, e.g. learning goals,
Professional Education Programme Modelling Language (PEPML) Project Management Tool
a) Metamodel
c) Integration
Foundation New In Progress Closed
Enactment
Analysis Design Development Implementation
aged in Task
man
Evaluation
Dependency Viewpoint Temporal Structure Viewpoint
Task Sequence
for Learning Goal indicates
b) PEPML Model
In Progress
Persona 1 Day Parallel 1
Topic Day 1
Sequence Session #3
Subtopic 09:00 1 Alternatives
Session #1
1 2 11:00
1
Session #4
facilitates Day Parallel 13:00
Session #2 Session #5
Educator 15:00
Figure 1: a) Packages of the PEPML metamodel (content of the packages with dashed borders is tenta-
tive), b) Example of a PEPML model from the dependency viewpoint (left) and the temporal structure
viewpoint (right) , c) Integration with project management tool
topics or educational components like lectures or group work. This viewpoint is especially
important for programme designers and their clients to capture and align learning goals, content
and available resources. (2) The temporal viewpoint visualises how educational components are
distributed over time. This viewpoint is relevant to all stakeholders to understand, communicate
and discuss a programme’s structure. Up to now, PEPML focuses primarily on analysing and
designing professional education programmes. Additional viewpoints and refinements of the
packages Development, Implementation and Evaluation are subject to future work.
Programme designers and managers must keep track of all tasks required to design and run
an education programme. The Enactment package allows associating tasks with any entity of an
education programme. In the dependency viewpoint, these tasks are connected via associations
to the respective entities. At the same time, a small indicator is used in the temporal structure
viewpoint (see ❶) to inform about the number of associated open tasks. Tasks linked to a
PEPML model are synchronised with project management tooling to provide additional task
management features, e.g. setting due dates or managing tasks in Kanban boards (see Figure 1.c).
Users can define completion criteria for tasks represented in PEPML models, which are
evaluated when a task’s status changes. When a task is completed but the completion criteria
are not fulfilled, the task is put into a specified failure status. Thereby, it is possible to ensure
that changes to a programme resulting from performing certain tasks are reflected in a PEPML
model. For instance, a task “Find Instructor” associated with an instructor-led session could
define that the instructor is represented in the PEPML model and associated with the respective
session upon task completion.
3. Tool Support
Modelling tool support is provided as an app for the collaborative online whiteboard Miro1 .
We track PEPML elements on Miro boards to preserve Miro’s modelling flexibility and still
offer advanced features, e.g. validating the syntactical correctness and applying fixes to solve
syntactical errors. PEPML language elements added to a Miro board via our custom toolbar or
that are part of a PEPML frame are automatically tracked. Alternatively, users can manually
define that an item represents a PEPML entity. When extracting the temporal structure, we
allow slight misplacements and offer auto-positioning features to fix such misplacements.
A Node.js backend extracts PEPML models from Miro boards and persists them in a Neo4j
graph database. Users can add persisted models to Miro boards via the PEPML toolbar. By
persisting PEPML models in Neo4j, models become queryable using Neo4j querying language
Cypher, which allows extracting (aggregated) information from models.
For enhanced task management, the tooling is integrated with the project management
tool OpenProject2 . Education programmes are represented as projects in OpenProject. Tasks
defined in a PEPML model are added to OpenProject and vice versa. Webhooks inform about
status changes of tasks, and users can specify completion criteria as Cypher queries, which are
evaluated on the persisted PEPML model in Neo4j.
1
https://miro.com
2
https://openproject.org
4. Conclusion & Future Work
Digital transformation is not just a technical or organisational challenge but also an educational
one. Bespoke professional education programmes are needed to prepare employees for digital
transformation and help them shape it. In this extended abstract, we present a model-driven
approach to design and manage such programmes. The basis for the approach is a modelling
language covering all life cycle phases of professional education programmes. In contrast to
purely focussing on programme design, our approach also supports the enactment of associated
processes. Our modelling tool support builds upon the digital whiteboard Miro and is well-suited
for remote collaboration. Enhanced process enactment support is realised by integrating with
the project management tool OpenProject.
For future work, we plan to finalize the Development, Implementation and Evaluation pack-
ages and conduct a user study to evaluate our modelling language and tooling with external
users to complete our design science research cycle. By allowing associating tasks with entities
of an education programme, we already support the enactment of processes without actually
prescribing any specific process. In the future, we want to extend our work to include process
modelling and create a situational method engineering approach for instructional design.
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