CourseEditor: A course planning tool compatible with IMS-LD Articles uri icon

publication date

  • September 2013

start page

  • 421

end page

  • 431

issue

  • 3

volume

  • 21

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1061-3773

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1099-0542

abstract

  • For the successful adoption of Computer Based Learning (CBL), it is necessary to provide teachers with user-friendly authoring tools that guide them in the process of planning a course. It is important that the documents generated by these tools are compliant with CBL standards to ensure that the instructional designs made by the teachers remain valid regardless of the Learning Management System (LMS) used to deliver the course. IMS-Learning Design (IMS-LD) is one of the most accepted specifications by the educational community for modeling of learning processes. There are some authoring-tools that allow export learning designs in IMS-LD but they are not course-planning oriented. In addition, a big challenge is how to improve the user interfaces of these tools in order to be easier to use for regular teachers. This paper presents CourseEditor, a course planning authoring tool that allows a teacher to describe the complete planning of a course (objectives, contents, methodology, and evaluation) and export the results in an IMS-LD compatible format. The paper provides a novel modeling of course planning that takes into account ideas from different instructional theories. CourseEditor combines power and flexibility, with the simplicity of an interface that can be used by teachers with no technical background. The paper illustrates the use of the tool creating a course on Telematic Services in the context of a Telecommunications Engineering degree. In addition, the relationships of course planning and IMS-LD are presented, showing which information of course planning can be represented in IMS-LD and which not. (c) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 421-431, 2013

subjects

  • Telecommunications

keywords

  • authoring tool; course planning; software tool; educational standards; ims-ld