A mash-up authoring tool for e-learning based on pedagogical templates

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand it aims at presenting the "pedagogical template" methodology for the definition of didactic activities, through the aggregation of atomic learning entities on the basis of pre-defined schemas. On the other hand it proposes a Web-based authoring tool to build learning resources applying a defined methodology. The authoring tool is inspired by mashing-up principles and allows the combination of local learning entities with learning entities coming from external sources belonging to Web 2.0 like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and SlideShare. Eventually, the results of a small-scale experimentation, inside a University course, purposed both to define a pedagogical template for "virtual scientific experiments" and to build and deploy learning resources applying such template are presented.