Specification of learning trails in virtual courses

Lifelong learning and goal driven learning create new requirements for virtual online courses. The development of virtual courses is not just a technical challenge, but is also a didactic and pedagogic challenge. In order to cope with the requirements met by heterogeneous student groups of online courses, learning trails are classified, which guide students through a course in different ways. A learning trail can be oriented to the didactic structure or the structure of the subject´s scientific domain, to learning units of the same type such as conclusions or exercises, to selective or modal structures. This enables students to use the some online course in a productive and effective way. L3-XML, an XML-DTD, is presented to specify an online course enabling different learning trails. The concept is demonstrated for the “Introduction to object oriented programming” course