Collaborative Development of Educational Modules - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 188

• Artifacts control : Integration problems
regarding the module's components, dis-
tributed authoring and modeling, visibility
of evaluations and performance results,
changes notification, and configuration
management should be addressed.
• Communication support : Development
teams should interact, exchanging expe-
riences, problems, solutions and results.
Also, all project information should be
available in order to guarantee the effec-
tive management of the module develop-
ment process.

SP-DEM is based on ISO/IEC 12207, tailored to
the context of educational modules by including
aspects of content modeling, practices from in-
structional design, and issues of “open products”
development and of distributed and cooperative
work.
SP-DEM establishes a set of processes that can
be employed to acquire, supply, develop, deliver,
operate, and maintain educational modules. Three
categories of processes are defined: (1) the primary
processes deal with the main activities and tasks
performed during the life cycle of an educational
module; (2) the supporting processes support
other processes and contribute to the success
and quality of the development project; and (3)
the organizational processes are employed by an
organization to establish, implement and improve
an underlying structure made up of associated life
cycle processes and personnel. Figure 2 shows the
overall structure of SP-DEM. Dashed rectangles
are the processes adapted from ISO/IEC 12207.
Dotted rectangles are the processes adapted from
the standard process for geographically dispersed
working groups (Maidantchik, 1999). White rect-
angles are the processes specifically developed to
the context of learning.
The establishment of the primary processes
considered principles and practices from instruc-
tional design, according to the five stages of
ADDIE model. These practices were spread out
through the activities and tasks related to the
primary processes. Table 1 shows the correspon-
dence among the ADDIE model stages and the
SP-DEM primary processes. For instance, Op-
eration and Delivery processes address issues of
the implementation stage of the ADDIE model.
Acquisition and Supply processes are not in-
cluded in the table since ADDIE does not con-
sider specific stages for addressing these issues.
The Definition Process is responsible for de-
termining the learning problem to be solved. It
identifies the users' needs for instruction and
establishes the learning requirements to be satis-
fied. The following activities are established: (1)

In this section we dealt with collaboration
under a developmental viewpoint. However, as
previously mentioned, the learning process can
also benefit from collaborative issues. In this sense,
collaborative learning, where several learners
learn together and from each other according to
well-designed learning methods, has proven to
be a successful method in traditional classroom
settings. In spite of that, in the context of lifelong
learning little attention has been paid to collabora-
tion so far (Wessner et al., 2002).

SP-DEM Definition

As stated by Paquette et al. (2005), software
engineering brings some interesting solutions to
meet demands required by innovative technologies
used in learning. By adapting software engineering
principles to instructional design, well-defined
process and principles can arise, helping develop-
ers to produce precisely described and high-quality
educational products. Motivated by this idea we
have proposed SP-DEM.
The ISO/IEC 12207 standard (ISO, 2004) aims
at defining and standardizing processes and basic
activities of the software development process.
Standardization of processes results on a standard
process, which is responsible for describing the
main elements that should be incorporated in any
defined process of the developing organization.