Towards Supporting Modeling Variability in E-Learning Application: A Case Study

As e-learning becomes a basic need for several universities, a variety of Learning Management Systems (LMS) is proposed on the market. However, available LMSs do not satisfy all the needs of different institutions, which push them to develop their own systems. Since developing and maintaining new software are cost, time and effort consuming, and with the increasing demand on e-Learning systems, it becomes necessary to find an efficient solution that allows the fast development of systems and overcomes the afore-mentioned issues. We strongly believe that adopting a software product line approach in e-Learning domain can bring important benefits. We propose a general model for collaborative learning processes and we present the development process of an e-Learning software product line. Throughout the development process, we demonstrate how this approach allows us to satisfy the variable needs of universities/learners and benefit from the systematic large-scale reuse at the same time. In order to help organizations in providing similar services without the need to structure each of them separately, this paper presents how to support variability in learning process modeling.