On the development of Educational Software: proposal of a Software Product Line for Interactive Learning Modules

Abstract

The current intense use of the Web to support education demands the development of new educational systems that promote better interactions between learners and contents, and also improve teachers’ tasks. This has implied on more complex systems and on the need to better integrate them on Web environments. This is the case of Interactive Learning Modules (iLM), a family of educational systems that can be integrated to Learning Management Systems. However, the lack of quality on development process can disturb potential benefits of using these learning tools, such as when the system behaves unexpectedly or when it takes a long time to fix this flaw. In order to reduce these problems, this work proposes a Software Product Line (SPL) for iLM, as a systematic development method. We present the design process of SPL and the creation of two iLM used to evaluate the influence of the SPL on this process. The evaluation showed better perception of productivity, code quality and programmers' satisfaction. Another contribution is an application framework, available as free software to improve the creation of new iLM.