Adrian: a platform for E-Learning Content Prodution

Abstract

Universities and other institutions related to education are investing time and resources in E-learning initiatives. This leads to an increasing number of course offers in E-learning format. There are environments, called Learning Management Systems (LMS), designed to help teachers in the management of their courses. These systems support the management of administrative information, student evaluation and all the interactivity between teacher and students and among students. However they do not provide tools to help teachers to prepare and to produce content: lessons, tests, guided lab sessions, ... Here is where ADRIAN comes into the scene providing support for content production. ADRIAN is composed by several components: one component to help producing lessons and lab guided sessions; one component for the production of tests and exams; one component to support the production of multimedia presentations; and one component to generate interfaces that integrate all the material produced (content parts) by the other components or developed elsewhere by the teacher. The whole system is being developed with XML (eXtended Markup Language) using descriptive markup for content, and related technologies like XSL (eXtended Stylesheet Language) for content transformations. This way we ensure the portability and platform independence of the system. The last mentioned component, the integration component, is based on ontologies; the user is asked to define an ontology for his course. After that the system generates automatically the web interface that integrates all the courseware components. In this paper we describe the ADRIAN architecture and the components developed so far. This description is illustrated with a real case study.