Software product line engineering for e-learning applications: A case study

As a consequence of the massive adoption of internet, different e-learning platforms, such as Moodle or WebCT, have been incorporated into educational institutions, ranging from schools to universities. As expected, a software market of auxiliary applications for these platforms has also emerged. One of the challenges these auxiliary applications must face is how to deal with the variability inherent to these different but similar platforms. Thus, we strongly believe the use of Software Product Line engineering techniques, whose goal is the effective production of similar software systems, can be greatly beneficial in this particular market segment. We demonstrate this idea by means of refactoring a data mining application, called ElWM (E-learning Web Miner), which works on e-learning platforms into a Software Product Line. We discuss the benefits obtained.