October 2006 Volume 9 Number 4

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objects. The main features of an LCMS are related to the content management, from the production to the storage including reusability and distribution of content. On the other hand an LMS manages the administrative functions (i.e. users’ activities logging and curriculum management), the distribution of contents to learners, and the tracking of the learners’ experiences and assessments. A relevant role is played by existing e-learning standards, in ensuring interoperability and reuse of didactical materials. Main interoperability specifications have been developed by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), with a specific working group, the Learning Technology Standards Committee, which is working on e-learning standardization (IEEE LTSC WG12, 2006) and IMS (Instructional Management System) Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2006). A relevant role is also played by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2006), which has developed a de-facto standard called SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004c), based on some specifications previously defined by IEEE-LTSC and IMS. It is structured in modules defining sub specifications. In this context let us introduce two SCORM modules: 1. The Content Aggregation Model (CAM) defining the structure of learning material, and describes it with metadata (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004a). 2. The Run-time Environment (RTE), a JavaScript Application Programming Interface (API) able to deliver real time information about user actions (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004b) to a LMS or a LCMS. Learning Object Production An interesting field in e-learning research is the simplification and automation of the learning objects production: some works can be found in literature which are devoted to automatically produce LOs starting from available didactical materials (created in many different formats), or by directly generating SCORM-compliant contents. Several projects and products provide authoring tools for e-learning materials (4system, 2006; Macromedia, 2006; ReadyGo Inc., 2006; SumTotal Systems Inc., 2006). They commonly imply high-level technical skills in order to be appropriately used by authors, which have typically to complete a preliminary training phase to effectively use them (as they can do with well-known “productivity tools”) These products generally provide authors with different interfaces and functionalities so that they can create e-learning materials, manage resources, aggregate contents, add meta-data, and so on. Some of these tools are free, while some others are commercial products. In many cases, the use of these new tools cannot be fully appreciated by authors of e-learning materials, who may prefer to rely on well-known productivity tools, which could allow them some savings in time and money. Products and platforms are designed by moving onto in this direction and they generate e-learning course materials starting from well-known productivity tools, such as Microsoft Word (Horizon Wimba, 2006; Serco, 2006). The main advantage in exploiting such products is that no learning and training phases are needed. On one hand these tools provide a too rigid structure in drawing up created contents, on the other hand they keep authors’ stylistic choices, instead of maintaining only designers’ ones, invalidating accessibility and usability principles. In addition, they do not support useful mechanisms to manage DTD configurations or allow the insertion of new structure style. One of these products (Horizon Wimba, 2006) provides a partial support to accessibility of created contents, but, in some cases, generated LOs are not compliant to international guidelines and laws, denying actual benefits to learners with disabilities. Another interesting issue in e-learning course contents creation is the design o Generative Learning Objects (GLOs) (Boyle et al., 2004; Bradley et al., 2004; Morales, 2005). The underlying idea is based on the division into two different parts the LOs creation. The first one consists of building a Learning Object Template (LOT), while the second one is devoted to adding the template a subject specific content. The LOT encloses the deep general structure of the e-learning course. Once a template has been created, authors and/or tutors can add different subject specific contents, i.e. the surface structure, so as to produce Learning Objects which fit the specific fields of the discipline. Finally, let us consider a new way to think intermediate data format that is promising to have an interesting impact on LO production. Microformats (Microformats.org, 2006). Microformats are a set of simple open data format standard which are developed and implemented for more/better structured web microcontent publishing. Some already developed microformats specify for example formats for calendar and events data. Many other microformats are currently in a developing phase. In (Downes, 2006) authors propose Microformats use in elearning, by conceiving it as a network phenomenon, so as to facilitate a personal e-learning centre design. 5
Accessible and personalized Learning Objects Other academic projects and works are devoted to produce accessible e-learning contents and/or to personalize them. One of these proposes the design of a prototype (Gabrielli et al., 2005; Mirabella et al., 2004) which drives authors in creating accessible didactical materials. The authoring interface of this prototype is developed in Java and its main aim is to support authors’ job with suggestions and examples. They are provided in order to show and explain how accessible contents have to be produced by providing appropriate and equivalent alternatives to learners and according to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c). In (Kelly et al., 2005), the authors propose a holistic approach for addressing e-learning accessibility which takes into account e-learning usability of pedagogic issues, student learning styles and needs and some other significant constrains which usually accessibility guidelines do not cover. The main aim of this work is showing how the whole quality of e-learning contents can be assured by using this approach. Open Adaptive Learning Environment (OPAL) 0 is an e-learning service, which considers the personalization of e-learning course contents and is based on the delivery of personalized contents. The personalization is done on the basis of students’ cognitive and presentation learning preferences by using aggregation models based on SCORM (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004c). Another interesting academic project is ELENA (Dolog et al., 2003; Dolog et al., 2004), which supports personalized access to distributed learning repositories. The approach to customization employed in this project takes advantage of semantic Web technologies and metadata description standards, such as LOM (IEEE LTSC WG12, 2002) and IMS AccessForAll Meta-data (IMS Global Learning Consortium, 2002a). In addition, it adapts and customizes access, delivery and consuming of learning services and LOs on the basis of rule-based matching of contents and learners descriptions. No one of the above described projects and products combines accessibility issues with methodologies to automatically produce LOs, like the ones described in Section 2.2. From content creation to e-learning delivery Context: the A 3 Project Teaching basic computer knowledge is becoming a matter of big interest in a lot of fields, particularly in Universities, where in every degree course is necessary to certify a minimal skill in computer knowledge. For this reason, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bologna has developed a project (called A 3 , Accessible Learning Environment (University of Bologna, 2004), “Ambiente Accessibile d’Apprendimento” in Italian language) for the creation and fruition of contents taking in a particular account the training structure uniformity, a low management cost, and a little effort in resources and time consumption for the process startup Main requirements related to LOs used in A³ are due to: Accessibility and Web standard compliance. The project was developed and carried out inside an Italian University and it respects the Italian Law on Information Accessibility, the so called “Stanca Act” (Italian Parliament, 2004). In particular, as requested by the Italian Law about Web accessibility: (i) all templates completely separate presentation from content and structure, by producing XHTML Strict 1.0 and CSS 2.0 code, (ii) layout and font dimensions are relative, and (iii) foreground and background colors are compliant to W3C requirements. Portability of LOs and e-learning standard compliance. Learning objects produced in A³ are package SCORM 1.2 RTE compliant (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004b), so that contents can be imported in every LMS (Learning Management System) SCORM compliant. The Italian Law about accessibility (Italian Parliament, 2004), analogously to the WCAG 1.0 (World Wide Web Consortium, 1999c) requires contents and services to be provided independently from the use of scripts and programming objects. This means that a complete use of SCORM is not possible in respect of the current set of Italian (or W3C) requirements, and specifically, only the SCORM-CAM (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004a) standard has a complete compatibility with accessibility specification. Otherwise the SCORM-RTE (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004b) module, devoted to Real Time activities, is completely based on the use of Javascript and it is not compatible with the (current) accessibility requirements. Let us note that both the Italian Law (near to adopt specific requirements on e-learning) and the WCAG (near to version 2.0) will be updated in the next future to allow Javascript and it will permit a full use of SCORM (World Wide Web Consortium, 2006). 6
Page 1 and 2: October 2006 Volume 9 Number 4
Page 3 and 4: Guidelines for authors Submissions
Page 5 and 6: How Does Educational Technology Ben
Page 7 and 8: Adaptivity is one of the most impor
Page 9: 3. Ease of editing and updating: wh
Page 13 and 14: From this definition, we figured ou
Page 15 and 16: Verifying contents Figure 3. The pa
Page 17 and 18: Figure 7. The ISA on line interface
Page 19 and 20: Adaptive Technology Resource Centre
Page 21 and 22: World Wide Web Consortium (1999a).
Page 23 and 24: guiding and supporting environment
Page 25 and 26: As an example, to improve the acces
Page 27 and 28: option). Although this finding migh
Page 29 and 30: of eLearning content and enhance th
Page 31 and 32: Hodgings, W. & Duval, E. (2002). IE
Page 33 and 34: the entire course of study. This sy
Page 35 and 36: information useful for the contextu
Page 37 and 38: Nr of student 25 20 15 10 5 0 a - w
Page 39 and 40: Vincenzo, a second year student, ne
Page 41 and 42: Evaluation Recently embodied conver
Page 43 and 44: The interaction may be performed on
Page 45 and 46: Poggi, I., Pelachaud, C., & de Rosi
Page 47 and 48: Lanzilotti, R., Ardito, C., & Costa
Page 49 and 50: quality in use, which is measured b
Page 51 and 52: process of designing high quality c
Page 53 and 54: eLSE methodology Designers and eval
Page 55 and 56: Execution phase Execution phase act
Page 57 and 58: on the inspection process and, cons
Page 59 and 60: Piccinini, N., & Scollo, G. (2006).
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Answers and reinforcement A.1: Use
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potential project ideas (from pure
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For each column in Table 2, the sum
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educational goals and the various r
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A new computerized Records Manageme
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eflected in artifacts and other str
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any distributed community include b
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message in order to obtain a respon
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Figure 3. Social network after intr
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increased face-to-face collaboratio
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References Bogenrieder, I. (2002).
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Donoghue, S. L. (2006). Institution
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contemplate part-time, rather than
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espective institutions. The primary
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greater flexibility in course selec
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Cost-benefit One distinct benefit o
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Resources The development of online
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courses where it is has little pote
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A fellowship programme, such as the
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Moore, M.G. (1998). Introduction. I
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Software reuse has two dimensions,
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Courseware development process mode
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Didactics analysis This phase consi
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Process didactics design We focus o
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The repository is organized into co
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the analysis and the design phase o
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Figure 12. Weaving content and dida
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complete user-specific (author, ins
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References ADL (Advanced Distribute
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Bender, D. M., & Vredevoogd, J. D.
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(see Figure 2). The incorporation o
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Figure 4: Example of Summary Image
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The competitive nature of design cl
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Dias, L. B. (1999, November). Integ
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materials built into the system. Th
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This theory of multimedia learning
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E-Tutor (with video). Two weeks aft
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empirically tested in TML environme
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Rieber, L. P., (1990). Animation in
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Appendix B The following 44 items r
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Appendix C A Sample of Exam Questio
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Appendix D Perceived Usefulness Que
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Kirkpatrick, and Peck (2001) have a
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2001). The system thus aims to assi
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a strong agreement between the two
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of the dynasty. 3. Information on
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Comparing works designed using the
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Tselios, N., Stoica, A., Maragoudak
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strategies during their interaction
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P(B|D) is the probability of a netw
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Online help adaptation using Bayesi
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AUSM that will return the most prob
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direct experimentation with a new s
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Figure 7. An example of use of the
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Cooper, J. & Herskovits, E. (1992).
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Goldberg, A. K., & Riemer, F. J. (2
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In addition to convenience, propone
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members increased flexibility. They
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Oppenheimer, T. (1997, July). The c
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The basis of reform in science educ
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technology and are not confident in
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participants that learning as a gro
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A hierarchy of Systems Identifying
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the change agents to recognize the
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Nonis, A. S., & O’Bannon, B. (200
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maintaining the interest levels of
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Focus group interviews with our stu
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course and again at the end of the
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second phase of valuing, commitment
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Kinzie, M. B., Whitaker, S. D., Nee
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Although this work is based on a st
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Website Design The MTP website (www
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Researchers, for review and coding
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quality that are the focus of the M
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Kelley, M. A., Whitaker, S. D., Nee
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or underserved populations. For exa
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2004 Baruch College Computer Center
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professional-level tools and resour
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Third, with the exception of the Om
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Hepp, P., Hinostroza, E., Laval, E.
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The AccessForAll strategy complemen
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of people with special needs, or di
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(including where their search for r
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international standard. The ISO pro
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information will be expressed using
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DC Metadata Terms: http://dublincor
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Choquet, C., & Corbière, A. (2006)
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TEL Standards, Specifications and P
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The Resources Management Process ma
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Step 1: Instantiation of the enterp
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Step 5: Instantiation of the techno
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correlation of the different viewpo
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Hummel, H., Manderveld, J., Tatters
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Karagiannidis, C. (2006). Book revi
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Glenn, L. (2006). Book review: Visu
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