Educational material
abounds on the Web, but still most designers of instructional material must
start from scratch. Emerging interoperability standards for educational
resources will accelerate progress toward reusability of this material. We
describe a framework called Model for Distributed Curriculum (MDC) that uses a
topic server architecture to allow one Web-based tutorial to include a
specification for another tutorial, a “virtual tutorial”, where the best fit to
this specification will automatically be found at run time. This allows a
designer of instructional material to re-use other Web-based tutorials without
having to know what tutorials will exist at run time, i.e. without having to
search and analyze material on the Web. Key to MDC is organizing Web-based
curriculum into a “topic space” rather than a “page space,” and making use of
emerging metadata standards for educational resources to describe the
pedagogically relevant properties of Web-based tutorials. Reviewers: Franz
Schmalhofer (U. Kaiserslautern), Markus Stolze (IBM Research), Arthur Stutt
(Open U.)