Supporting Exception Handling in Scripted Collaborative Courses

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to ICT use in educational settings vary from simple scenarios of content management to highly structured learning processes supported by process engines. The latter approach is that of Educational Modeling Languages, which structure learning processes as a flow of tasks that are assigned to a certain user/group. From an extensive literature review, the main drawback that is hindering the adoption of this approach is that of the adaptation: learning processes are previously designed to be posteriorly enacted by a process engine. A simple change in the process definition due to a non foreseen situation entails to stop and enact it again. This is a mayor flaw of this kind of approaches, because of its excessive rigidity. In this paper we make a review of current state-of-the-art in process engines that support learning processes, and we propose an execution semantics that supports exception handling in learning scenarios.