Towards the Establishment of a Standard Process for Developing Educational Modules

Educational modules, concise units of study capable of integrating theoretical/practical content and supporting tools, are relevant mechanisms to improve the learning process. Despite their relevance, none of the initiatives to address the problem of creating educational modules considers a systematic process for developing them. The establishment of a well-defined set of guidelines and supporting mechanisms should ease the distributed and cooperative work to create, reuse and evolve educational modules, taking also into account the impact on the learning process. In this work we present a standardized process we have established aiming at creating well-designed, highly flexible and configurable educational modules. Aspects of process specialization and instantiation have also been considered. Its application is illustrated by the development of a software testing educational module, which has been applied and preliminarily evaluated in terms of the learner´s attitude toward content, usability and navigational aspects. In general, we observed a positive attitude toward the flexibility provided by the produced educational module