A Framework for the Management of Digital Educational Contents Conjugating Instructional and Technical Issues

Nowadays, the e-learning industry is focused on producing and managing digital learning contents. There are several examples of learning objects, content packages or metadata proposed by different organizations such as IMS, IEEE or ADL. However, little attention has been paid to the specification and management of instructional processes, teaching strategies and learning activities. These issues are addressed by instructional design approaches but there are few formal computer-based notations and methods to specify and implement them. This paper describes a framework for managing digital contents and the processes that use them in an instructional way both from an instructional point of view as well as from a software design perspective. Such framework is based on an instructional application model which provides entities such as the User Profile that stores relevant information concerning the learning and teaching processes; the Learning Scenario as the set of terms, conditions and activities that characterize the user learning in a specific context and the Didactic Structure that is addressed to organize educational contents in a didactic way. The proposed framework supports the translation of these instructional entities to hypermedia entities in order to support the software design of e-learning products. Thus, this design method eases the development of Web-based instructional applications that can be adapted to different learning contexts.