A Software Engineering Approach for Design of Educational Technologies

Abstract

This thesis is driven by the idea of advancing computing to address critical challenges in the domain of education. In particular, focuses on facilitating the design of educational technologies for scale and variety, where scale is the number of systems to be developed and variety stems from a diversified range of instructional designs [consisting of varied goals, processes, content, teacher styles, learner styles and so on]. More specifically, we address this challenge in the context of adult literacy in India [287 million learners, 22 Indian languages]. How to design and customize educational technologies that adhere to instructional design principles, provide flexibility and are less effort intensive? newline newlineThe crux of the proposed approach in this thesis is to address this challenge by the application of software engineering ideas like patterns, ontologies and software product lines without losing focus on instructional design. This approach consists of (i) modeling different aspects of instructional design like goals, process and content using patterns and mapping them to Bloom s taxonomy and Merrill s first principles of instruction (ii) representing these patterns using an ontology based framework that systematically captures different aspects of instructional design (iii) based on the modeling of domain through patterns and ontologies, this thesis presents a pattern oriented software product lines approach for modeling a family of instructional designs and for further semi-automatically generating eLearning Systems based on these instructional designs. newline newlineFinally, we demonstrate how software tools built on top of our approach [http://rice.iiit.ac.in] can be used to semi-automatically generate eLearning Systems for flexible instructional designs and multiple Indian languages. We see that the proposed approach for scale and variety based on patterns, ontologies and software product lines could be applicable beyond adult literacy to the broad spectrum of education, and in particular to skill and school education.