Towards a Synthesis of Learning Methodologies, Learning Technologies and Software Product Lines

The tremendous potential of technology to support teaching/learning is being critically questioned today because of the significant decrease in quality of instruction and the massive effort of developing and maintaining educational technologies. In four and half years of our experience of analyzing and improving a decade long technology for adult literacy, we observed a strong need for (i) a unified modeling framework to organize instructional material in the form of data (ii) a technology platform to support the framework in (i) and an interactive environment based on the framework for both teachers and learners (iii) a methodology that accelerates the development and maintenance of educational technologies. In this paper, we briefly present our work that addresses some of the above needs through (i) GAMBLE, a unified modeling framework to improve quality of instruction by organizing instructional material in the form of data (facts, cases, rules, models-fcrm). Essentially, GAMBLE is a goal-driven model-based approach to teaching/learning based on fundamental learning methodologies (ii) We briefly discuss about our technology platform for modeling instructional material in the form of fcrm and present GURU, an integrated and interactive authoring and learning environment for both teachers and learners based on GAMBLE (iii) We expose the challenges of applying software product lines to accelerate educational technologies and suggest Lean Software Product Lines (SPLEAN) as a light-weight, integrated approach to address the scale and variety inherent in technology for education (T4E) domain. While (i) and (ii) are proposed specifically for adult literacy, we believe that they are also widely applicable to other areas like school and engineering education.