Collaborative Development of Educational Modules - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 191

maturity model for educational modules develop-
ment has been proposed and used as a support-
ing mechanism to the SP-DEM specialization
(Barbosa, 2004; Barbosa & Maldonado, 2006b,
Barbosa & Maldonado, 2008b). The main goals
are to guarantee that collaborative and distributed
projects can be developed with unlike maturity
level teams and, also, to improve each working
group capability.
CMMI/Educational was adapted from CMMI
to the context of learning. The capability matu-
rity model for geographically dispersed software
development (Maidantchik, 1999) was also con-
sidered to establish the tasks and practices related
to the collaborative and distributed creation of the
modules. Both continuous and staged representa-
tions were addressed. In this section, we describe
the staged representation of CMMI/Educational.
Details about the continuous representation are
available at (Barbosa, 2004).
Similar to the staged representation of CMMI
for software, CMMI/Educational establishes five
maturity levels:

4. Quantitatively Managed : The process is
quantitatively measured and managed.
Process performance can be foreseen.
5. Optimizing : Changes in technologies, learn-
ing paradigms and principles, and even in
the process itself can be managed to avoid
impacting on the quality of the modules.

Table 2 presents the overall structure of CMMI/
Educational, considering the process areas (PAs)
established in each maturity level. PAs in bold are
specifically defined for the educational modules
development. For instance, Knowledge Evolu-
tion Management ( KEM ) is responsible for: (1)
identifying, choosing and evaluating the new
information related to the subject domain; and
(2) establishing and maintaining the supporting
mechanisms to integrate the new information into
the module. Besides that, some specific practices
were included as part of existing PAs. For instance,
at Level 5 we defined a new practice - Change
Management of Educational Paradigms and
Principles -, included as part of the PA Organiza-
tional Innovation and Deployment ( OID ). Further
information regarding CMMI/Educational can be
found at (Barbosa, 2004).
By determining the correspondence among
the SP-DEM issues and the PAs of CMMI/Edu-
cational we can identify the process categories
that would require more attention and generate
the SP-DEM specializations. The specialization
of a given maturity level is generated by exclud-
ing the activities of higher levels. So, the special-
ization of the second level does not contain the
activities of the third, fourth and fifth levels. In-
stead, it contains only the activities related to the
PAs of Level 2.

1. Initial : There is no defined process for the
entire organization or, if so, it is not adopted
and/or followed. The quality of the educa-
tional modules depends on competence of
individuals, i.e., changing people impacts
on the quality of the modules. Most of the
problems are managerial, not technical.
2. Managed : Organizational policies guide
the projects, establishing management pro-
cesses. Well-succeed development practices
can be repeated in new projects.
3. Defined : There is a well-defined process
for developing the modules. Such process
is approved, documented and accepted by
the entire organization; it is adapted for
each project, according to specific needs.
Organization is concerned with the collec-
tion and dissemination of lessons learned of
a given project for the other ones.

Instantiating SP-DEM

An instance of a process should take in account the
development and organizational environment; it
may address specific features of a particular project.
Process instantiation consists of the selection and