Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of the module. The related activities are: (1)
initial
specification
; (2)
determination of the module's
components
; (3)
planning
; (4)
determination of
standards
; (5)
documentation of the planning
process
; and (6)
revision and approval
. In the case
of distributed development teams, such activities
should be organized in two levels - one for each
work team, and another considering the project as
a whole. In the case of “open modules” develop-
ment, the planning activities can be conducted in
a more flexible way. However, emphasis should
be given for team planning, selecting developers
and allocating them adequate roles, according
to their personal interests and motivations for
participating in the project.
The
Development Process
aims at changing a
set of learning requirements into an educational
module that meets the stated needs. Basically, it ad-
dresses the life cycle activities for the development
of educational modules: (1)
process establishment
;
(2)
analysis
; (3)
design
; (4)
implementation and
integration
; (5)
testing
; (6)
installation
; (7)
meta-
data construction and updating
; (8)
management
of the terminology repository
; (9)
documentation
of the development process
; and (10)
support
for acceptance
. Particularly, the task of content
modeling is established as part of activity (3).
Such task will be described later in this chapter.
Finally, the
Delivery Process
establishes the
activities and tasks that should be performed by the
module's instructor, being specifically defined for
the context of educational modules development.
The following activities are established: (1)
initia-
tion
; (2)
delivery
; (3)
monitoring and instructional
support
; and (4)
identification of problems and
improvements
. For instance, activity (4) addresses
the problems and weaknesses found when using
the module. They should be registered and sent
to the
Maintenance Process
. Learning goals and
objectives not achieved as well as the knowledge
resulting from using the module should be identi-
fied, documented and published for future improve-
ments. Cases of success and recommendations for
future developments should also be reported.
In this section we briefly described some of
the SP-DEM primary processes, including related
activities and tasks. Supporting and organizational
processes were established in a similar way as the
primary ones. Readers can find further details
about the complete set of SP-DEM processes,
activities and tasks in (Barbosa, 2004).
SP-DEM Specialization
and Instantiation
The standard process is responsible for the es-
tablishment of a unique development structure to
be adopted and followed by the entire organiza-
tion (Barbosa & Maldonado, 2006b). However,
changes in organizational procedures, learning
paradigms and principles, learning requirements,
development methods and strategies, as well as the
size and complexity of the projects, among other
aspects, impact the way the educational module is
produced. Thus, the processes should be defined
on a case by case basis, taking into account the
specific features of each particular project.
Process specialization and instantiation have
been explored in order to apply the SP-DEM into
specific learning environments and organizations
(Barbosa & Maldonado, 2008b). In short, the
definition of a process for developing a specific
educational module should consider its adequacy
to: (1) the adopted technologies, supporting
mechanisms and budget; (2) the domain of the edu-
cational application; (3) the characteristics of the
module; (4) the maturity level of the development
team; and (5) the characteristics of the organiza-
tion. In this sense, processes into different levels
of abstraction can be defined. The main aspects
of SP-DEM instantiation and specialization are
briefly discussed next.
Specializing SP-DEM: the
CMMI/Educational Model
In the same line as the CMMI model for software
development (Chrissis et al., 2003), a capability
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