XEDU, a framework for developing XML-based didactic resources

Abstract

Recent educational software applications use Web technologies like XML to improve teaching methods in distance learning environments. Though XML has already been used to implement a high number of didactic resources, specification methodologies to develop these resources are rarely applied. As a consequence, the reuse and maintenance of those resources becomes a difficult task. This paper emphasises the use of hypermedia models to deal with this problem. Hypermedia models have long considered to have a great potential to represent educational applications. The current work proposes the XEDU framework that works over the Labyrinth hypermedia model, to manage and organise didactic resources. The proposed framework provides a set of abstract didactic structures and the interface to associate them either to XML-based contents and other complex didactic resources.