Collaborative Development of Educational Modules: A Need for Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learning has to accommodate a variety of types of learners who differ in age, learning experiences, media preferences, learning styles, capability for working in teams, among others. To be more effective, lifelong learning scenarios require the establishment and integration of innovative methods, tools, and procedures into well-defined processes, aiming at producing customized and high-quality educational products, capable of better engaging the students (and teachers as well) in an active learning process. Collaborative development plays an important role in this perspective, providing means for developers from different domains, working on multi-disciplinary and heterogeneous teams, geographically dispersed or not, cooperating, sharing data and information regarding the materials being developed. At the very end, the envisioned scenario is to evolve collaborative development in collaborative learning, broadening the learning opportunities to actively involve learners in their own knowledge construction process. In this chapter, the authors explore the collaborative development of educational modules and its implications in lifelong learning scenarios. They discuss the establishment of a systematic process for developing educational modules, providing a set of guidelines and supporting mechanisms to collaboratively create, reuse and evolve them. Also, as part of the process, the authors focus on issues of content modeling aiming at helping the developers to determine the relevant parts of the knowledge domain and to structure the concepts and related information. They illustrate the application of ideas by the collaborative development of an educational module for software testing domain. The module has been preliminarily evaluated; in general, positive attitudes toward the quality and flexibility it provides can be observed.

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