What makes it hard to apply software product lines to educational technologies?

In this paper, we present our experience of mining a software product line (SPL) from 9 existing eLearning systems developed at 9 different locations by 9 different teams following 9 varied development processes over a decade. The goal of this family of eLearning systems is to address 287 million adult illiterates in India spread across 22 Indian languages. This presents a unique and challenging situation as the SPL arises from a societal context rather than a business context as in traditional SPL. We explain the context of this domain and present the key challenges of mining an SPL from these eLearning systems. The main intent of this paper is to present our journey of applying SPL to these legacy eLearning systems in the last six years. Finally, we briefly discuss the ideas of Lean Software Product Lines and Global Software Product Lines as two potential future research directions for the SPL community.