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— As result of the discussions maintained at the Panel Session on “Software Development for E-Learning” of the 3rd Workshop on Software Engineering for E-Learning (ISELEAR’12), several points of view emerged regarding the conception, development and maintenance of E-Learning solutions. This paper summarizes and confronts these points of view: automated approaches, combination of different methodologies, emphasis on human and social aspects, domain- specific development approaches, model-driven / language- driven development and system integration approaches, and grammar-oriented development. While these points of view support different approaches to the engineering process, all of them share a common goal: to facilitate the development of complex E-Learning applications and solutions by multidisciplinary teams of software developers, instructors, domain experts, students and final users.

Son muchos los centros educativos a todos los niveles que utilizan cursos virtuales como herramienta de apoyo a la docencia. Los profesores han de planificar estos cursos con anterioridad al inicio de los mismos, y como norma general, sitúan un documento estático informativo con la planificación en la zona superior del curso virtual. A posteriori, habrán de crear las diferentes actividades y definir los métodos de evaluación en el curso virtual utilizando las opciones que nos da la plataforma. Con LearningAssessmentDesigner podrá definir de forma sencilla y visual la planificación de actividades y evaluación de un curso virtual.

Diverse authoring approaches and tools have been designed to assist the creation of units of learning compliant to current learning technology speci¯cations. Although visual and pattern-based editors of Learning Designs (LD) can help to abstract the learning designer from the details of the speci¯cations, they are still far from a high-level, integrated authoring environment. This paper analyzes the major approaches used to transform an abstract LD into a concrete unit of learning (UoL) , according to three desired features: the use of patterns and other design techniques to abstract the speci¯c representational details; the di®erence between the abstract source LD model and the concrete target UoL model; and the possibility of combining multiple models into a single environment. A classi¯cation is proposed for the LD techniques commonly found in the analyzed approaches, which we refer to as non-representational LD, in order to underline its abstraction from the details of the underlying speci¯cations. We have integrated such non-representational LD techniques in a uni¯ed Model-Driven Learning Design (MDLD) meta-modelling environment. MDLD has been used to generate units of learning from several meta-models, and tested on a IMS LD case study retrieved from the Learning Networks' knowledge base. The work concludes with a discussion on the possibilities of the new model-driven approach for learning designers.

The increasing size and complexity of hypermedia and Web applications puts stress on the need for using design models and methods whenever quality, usability, maintainability or reusability are critical. Moreover, to make the tasks of developers and designers more straightforward and effective, such models and methods should be supported by software tools providing explicit guidance during the development process as well as fast-prototyping. The paper introduces a design environment called AriadneTool that assumes the Ariadne Development Method (ADM). ADM proposes a systematic, iterative and user-centered approach to develop hypermedia and Web applications that deals with six design perspectives in an integrated way: navigation, presentation, structure, behavior, processes and access. The AriadneTool toolkit automates the ADM development process, offering interfaces to create the different products of the method. It also incorporates the use of ontologies to facilitate semantic support that allows for checking the consistency of modelling and for improving the users' understanding of the method. Once the designer has created the specifications of the system, the toolkit makes it possible to generate documentation concerning the system design, to validate the different products or to produce HTML, XML, SMIL and RDF implementation templates automatically.