An integrated content modeling approach for educational modules

Abstract

Educational modules – concise units of study capable of integrating theoretical/practical contents and supporting tools – can be seen as relevant mechanisms to facilitate the student’s apprenticeship. The establishment of processes and modeling approaches should ease the cooperative work to create, reuse and evolve educational modules, taking also into account the impact on the learning process. There are initiatives to address the problem of modeling educational contents, but none of them provides a complete set of features addressing the conceptual, instructional and didactic perspectives. Moreover, these initiatives do not consider a systematic process for developing educational modules. In this work we summarize the main aspects of a standardized process for developing educational modules we have proposed, focusing on the modeling activity for structuring the learning contents. An integrated modeling approach is presented and its application is illustrated by the development of an educational module for the software testing domain. The material produced has been applied and preliminarily evaluated in terms of the student's attitude toward content, usability and navigational aspects.