Strumenti di authoring orientati all’autore

Abstract

In early e-learning systems, platforms require high technical competence to publish courses materials; so digitalization of existing courseware was accomplished by technical staff. Present generation systems have advanced several steps in automatic publishing. Yet domain experts — especially in the Humanities area — are seldom able to create online courses autonomously without technical support. They do not feel comfortable with HTML, XML, database, standards and so on. But they increasingly want to control the result of course publishing, in terms of structure and of interface. Today’s challenge is the direct development of original didactic content by domain experts, with some or no technical knowledge. We think it is not the author who has to adapt himself to platform requirements (language, dimension, articulation), but the authoring tool that has to build a bridge between author and platform. We should provide authors with authoring tools especially designed for them. This means not only an easy-to-use application, but one that respects their cognitive styles, their pedagogical beliefs, their document structuring habits. Technology has to be as transparent as possible, and act as an empowering tool, not as a limit. These ideas are largely shared; although, not many platforms have their own authoring tool, and, if so, rarely are they designed bearing in mind the typical author, who normally has no technical expertise, or his/her everyday work-needs. This paper describes the main design choices that led us to develop ADA Lesson Generator, over a seven-year period, from a research tool for drawing conceptual maps to an e-learning authoring tool that allows authors to visually create non-linear complex structures, to control the way students can navigate in it and to manage the «life» of a course from its first version to all subsequent releases