Developing Educational Software Components

The demand for educational software is growing exponentially with the surge of interest in educational reform, the Internet, and distance learning. Educational applications must be flexible because curricula and teaching styles vary greatly among institutions, locations, and even among instructors at the same institution. To meet these needs, a wide array of small-scale, casual developers at universities, research labs, and small businesses develop educational software, but no dominant solution or supplier has seemed to emerge. In this market, smaller suppliers often cannot produce full solutions without depending on the capabilities of other vendors. Until now, components have remained largely the province of full-time programmers. However, component technologies are likely to expand toward an audience that comprises considerably less technical and more domain-oriented users whose job descriptions typically don't include software development. Thus, the lessons learned could become increasingly important to developing good software for any application domain. Having component developers collaborate with domain experts to build applications may be the future of software development. This group of component developers discusses what they've learned in collaborating with educators on educational software components.