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software tools, and persons, organizations, or
events referenced during technology supported
learning ” (IEEE/LTSC, 2000). Considering the
IEEE/LTSC's definition of learning objects, both
theoretical and practical content can be seen as
learning objects; therefore, in our definition an
educational module can also be represented as a
collection of learning objects.
Similar to software products, educational
modules require the establishment of systematic
development processes to produce customized,
reliable and high-quality products. Besides the
collaborative issues mentioned above, there is also
a need for adaptability, scalability, interoperability
and reusability - educational modules should be
seen as independent units of study, subject to be
adopted in different learning scenarios, according
to parameters such as learner's profiles and skills,
instructor's preferences, learning goals and course
length, among others. Openness is another trend
to be considered - the idea is to provide a culture
for “open educational modules”, so that the use
and evolution of them by a broader community
would be better motivated and become a real-
ity, particularly for active and lifelong learning
environments.
Despite its relevance, none of the initiatives
to address the problem of creating educational
modules considers a collaborative, well-defined
process for developing them. Motivated by this
scenario, in this chapter we discuss the estab-
lishment of a systematic process for developing
educational modules, aiming at providing a set of
guidelines and supporting mechanisms to collab-
oratively create, reuse and evolve them (Barbosa,
2004; Barbosa & Maldonado, 2006b). SP-DEM
(Standard Process for Developing Educational
Modules) is based on ISO/IEC 12207 standard
(ISO, 2004), taking also into account practices
from instructional design (Gagné et al., 1992;
Dick et al., 2001), aspects of “open products”
development (McConnell, 1999) and of distrib-
uted and cooperative work (Maidantchik, 1999).
Besides that, in the same line as the CMMI model
for software (Chrissis et al., 2003), a capability
maturity model for educational modules, named
CMMI/Educational, is proposed. The main goals
are to guarantee that distributed projects can be
developed with unlike maturity level teams and
to improve each working group capability.
As part of the SP-DEM definition, we have also
addressed issues of content modeling (Barbosa,
2004; Barbosa & Maldonado, 2006a), working
on the establishment of an integrated approach
for modeling educational content - IMA-CID
(Integrated Modeling Approach - Conceptual,
Instructional and Didactic) (Barbosa, 2004; Bar-
bosa & Maldonado, 2006a). By means of a set
of models, IMA-CID helps the developer(s) to
determine the relevant parts of the knowledge
domain, providing a systematic way to structure
the concepts and related information. Considering
a collaborative development process, the IMA-
CID models can be particularly useful to represent
the instructional design rationale, playing a key
role to easier evolve and maintain the resulting
educational products.
This chapter is organized as follows. Firstly,
we provide a literature review regarding models of
instructional design and content modeling initia-
tives that have been adopted in the development
of educational products. Secondly, we provide a
definition for educational modules, describing
its main components and characteristics. Thirdly,
we present SP-DEM and discuss some issues of
process specialization and instantiation; CMMI/
Educational is briefly described as well. Then, we
summarize the relevance of the content model-
ing activity, presenting the IMA-CID approach
and describing the set of models it comprises.
Following, we illustrate the application of SP-
DEM and IMA-CID in the development of an
educational module for software testing. Results
from preliminary evaluations on the learning
effectiveness achieved are presented as well.
We also summarize our main contributions and
perspectives for further work. Besides that, we
briefly discuss some opportunities and emerging
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