A teacher friendly environment to foster learner-centered customization in the development of interactive educational packages

A good teacher is able to customize the lesson to fit the requirements and needs of the learners he or she has in the classroom. This process becomes difficult and expensive in open and distance education, where customization means availability of similar contents, presented in diversified styles. A methodology and the tools to tackle the problem by using automated course compilation have been developed in the 3DE project (Design, Development, and Delivery--Electronic Environment for Educational Multimedia). The work on course customization showed the key role of the authoring process and the related problems. This paper summarizes the methodology and describes the development environment designed to assist authors in the creation of customized educational material. The environment seeks to help teachers/authors understand the relations among pedagogical and technical aspects and provides instructions, guidelines, and assistance for the development of learning-styles-aware material. The paper focuses on the author interface of the environment with details on the pedagogical framework, the authors' guide, the classification guide, and the metadata tool. Index Terms--Authoring guide, automated course construction, educational effectiveness, interoperability, learning styles (LSs), personalized learning, reuse.