Towards next generation activity-based Web-based educational systems

The need for e-learning systems that support a diverse set of pedagogical requirements has been identified as an important issue in Web-based education. Until now, significant R&D effort has been devoted aiming towards Web-based educational systems tailored to specific pedagogical approaches. The main drawback of those systems is that they are closed, self-contained systems that cannot interexchange either educational content or activities. On the other hand, several learning management systems already exist delivering Web-based courses with limited pedagogical flexibility, but are able to share/exchange learning content in the form of learning objects. The most advanced of them are based on the IEEE Learning Technology Systems Architecture and use standardized content structuring based on the ADL shamble content object reference model. However, sharing of learning activities among different LMSs still remains an open issue. The open question is how learning management systems should be designed in order to enable sharing and reusing of learning activities. In this paper we first examine the limitations of the current state-of-the-art Web-based learning systems and authoring tools and investigate the use of the IMS learning design specification as a mean to address those limitations. Then, we propose a high-level architecture of an authoring system and runtime engine that utilizes the IMS learning design and at the same time keeps conformance with the SCORM reference model to provide the means for designing activity-based Web-based educational systems.