Emilio Gustavo Ormeño

Reusing courseware components

Traditional courseware tools produce courseware with property formats. Unfortunately, these formats are incompatible among them. Therefore, the reuse of courseware material is limited to those developed with the same courseware tool. The functionality of a courseware becomes limited to that provided by a specific courseware tool. To solve these problems this paper proposes a framework of software components. The software components are JavaBeans that provide an interchangeable format among courseware tools supporting this specification. It means the components of the framework make possible to reuse courseware contents and functionality among these tools. The reuse is a very desirable practice because it could reduce the courseware development time and cost. The obtained results using the proposed framework are encouraging.

A CMT-based modeling language for courseware design

This paper presents a language for courseware design that tries to overcome usability limitations shown by the Course Modeling Technique (CMT). The proposed language is able to deal with the key aspects of courseware design: objectives, contents, and instructional path. Given that its potential users are non-technical, the representation of the language is close to natural language. For its design, an emperical experimentation was made comparing its expressivity power regard to CMT. The results showed that the proposed language is more expressive and avoids some ambiguities that appears when CMT is used. Finally, the designers who participate in the tests, think that the new language is better than CMT in terms of effort required to use it.