Creation of appropriate educational content is a major
challenge and cost factor in the increasing important areas of on-line and
life-long learning. The aim of the ongoing Courseware-on-Demand project is
to enable the creation of course content by recomposing parts extracted from
existing annotated course materials. Course materials comprising a variety
of learning objects (slides, video, audio, textbook, etc.), are gathered,
decomposed into elementary learning fragments, appropriately annotated,
indexed, and stored. They are further augmented with course structures and
dependencies (prerequisite and precedence). A course designer who has a
particular training goal in mind can pose a query to the
Courseware-on-Demand system, expressing that goal. The first step in
processing the query is to locate course fragments containing material
relevant to the goal. Then, taking into account the dependencies, the system
can define a minimal path in the metadata network that leads to the goal.
The last step is to physically extract the parts of the course materials
retrieved during the previous step, and compose the new teaching material or
propose a training schedule (temporal ordering) on top of an existing course
curriculum. |