Collaborative Development of Educational Modules - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 185

SP-DEM: A STANDARD
PROCESS FOR DEVELOPING
EDUCATIONAL MODULES

defined structure to represent it. Thus, the way
the educational module is structured and organized
deeply impacts its learning effectiveness. So, it
is fundamental that when creating an educational
module designers (not necessarily the domain
experts) clearly understand the subject domain,
being able to identify and organize concepts and
relevant information and, also, to specify practi-
cal activities and related evaluations.
Another characteristic to be considered is the
dynamic and evolutionary aspect of knowledge,
i.e. new knowledge is continuously produced and
referenced in response to previously acquired
learning experiences. In each class, either tra-
ditional or distance learning mode, new content
(e.g. slides, annotations, texts, results and sub-
products from practical activities) is created when
delivering the module to learners, and should be
incorporated into the content previously defined.
In fact, the learning material is continuously
expanded (active growth) as a consequence of
contributions of all course participants (learners
and teachers). Furthermore, such material is fre-
quently referenced (intrinsic reference), aiming
at both consolidating the previous knowledge
acquired as well as motivating the apprenticeship
of new concepts and information inter-related.
Finally, issues regarding reuse and sharing of
knowledge should also be addressed. Reusability
allows the content developed in a given learning
context to be easier available and transferable to
another one, with different educational purposes.
However, different needs, backgrounds and skills
can represent a barrier to effective learning. Since
there can be widely different viewpoints and as-
sumptions regarding the same subject matter, the
consequent lack of a shared understanding can
lead to poor communication and collaboration,
impacting the learning processes in general. In-
deed, a shared conceptualization of the knowledge
domain represents the basis for constructing and
for reusing high-quality educational modules.

Similar to software products, educational mod-
ules require the establishment and integration
of innovative methods, tools and procedures
into systematic processes aiming at producing
customized, reliable and high-quality products.
The development of such modules can involve
developers from different domains, working
on multi-disciplinary and heterogeneous teams,
geographically dispersed or not. They should
cooperate, sharing data and information regarding
the project. Furthermore, we should consider the
adoption of supporting tools, which can be used
either as part of the educational module under
construction or as a mechanism to automate its
development process.
Next we discuss the standardization of process-
es for developing educational modules, describing
the main characteristics of SP-DEM - a Standard
Process for Developing Educational Modules
(Barbosa, 2004; Barbosa & Maldonado, 2006b).

Development Issues

In the establishment of SP-DEM some specific
issues for the development of education modules
were considered - practices for instructional
design, content modeling, “open products” devel-
opment and collaborative and distributed work.
Content modeling will be considered in a specific
section of this chapter. The other issues will be
briefly discussed next.

Instructional Design

Instructional design (Gagné et al., 1992; Clark,
2000, Lee & Owens, 2000; Dick et al., 2001)
consists of the systematic application of scien-
tific principles about how people learn aiming at
developing instruction . The most basic model of
instructional design is the ADDIE model (Gagné