Collaborative Development of Educational Modules - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 209

• Interactivity or connectedness: The

knowledge produced by a network should
be the product of an interaction between its
members, rather than a simple aggregation
of the members' perspectives.

capability for working in teams, among others.
Collaboration plays an ever more important role
in order to deal with such diversity. Besides that,
there is a need for the establishment and integra-
tion of innovative methods, tools and procedures
into well-defined processes, aiming at produc-
ing customized and high-quality educational
products, capable of better engaging the students
(and teachers as well) in more active learning
processes. Considering this scenario, this chapter
provided a discussion of supporting mechanisms
for the collaborative development of educational
products: (1) a standard process for developing
educational modules (SP-DEM); and (2) an in-
tegrated approach for modeling the educational
content (IMA-CID). The application of SP-DEM
and IMA-CID was illustrated by the collaborative
development of an educational module for the
software testing domain.
The main contribution of this chapter is to
motivate the use of systematic and innovative
mechanisms for collaboratively creating high-
quality educational modules. By using the resulting
modules, the goal is to better promote the devel-
opment of lifelong competences and expertise in
several different but related knowledge domains,
engaging learners and teachers in an empowering
way. In this sense, the produced modules should
provide: (1) transferability to different institutions
and learning environments; (2) effective support
to traditional learning approaches; and (3) ef-
fective support to non-traditional environments,
motivating the transition from lecture-based to
self-directed and lifelong learning.
Many issues regarding collaborative develop-
ment and lifelong learning remain opened and must
be further addressed. At the very end, we intend
to establish a culture for “open and collaborative
learning materials” so that the use and evolution
of them by a broader learning community would
be better motivated and become a reality. The
existence of a well-defined process to systematize
the development of learning materials and, at the
same time, flexible enough to be adaptable to

• Openness: Each entity in a network must

be able to contribute to the network, and
each entity needs to be able to receive from
the network. Particularly, openness offers
the opportunity to narrow the boundar-
ies between producers and consumers as
consumers themselves become producers,
through creating and sharing. One impli-
cation is the potential for “open” learning
materials, through learners themselves be-
coming producers of open content, books,
multimedia, and so on (Attwell, 2007).

According to the ideas discussed above, plan-
ning for the future in active and lifelong learn-
ing assumes investigating innovative principles,
processes, methods and technologies to foster
learning opportunities capable of promoting
autonomy, encouraging diversity, enabling inter-
action and supporting openness. In this regard,
collaborative development will play a role ever
more important, putting the learner as the main
responsible for designing customized, adaptable,
evolvable, reliable and high-quality educational
products. At the very end, the envisioned scenario
is to make collaborative development turns into
collaborative learning and vice-versa. Particularly,
we believe that systematic processes, supported
by well-defined content models, will be the basis
from which the learner will draw connections to
acquire, evolve, disseminate and collaborate in
using the knowledge information.

CONCLUSION

Lifelong learning has to accommodate a variety
of types of learners, who differ in age, learning
experiences, media preferences, learning styles,