Software Engineering Aids to Accelerate Educational Technologies

How can we reduce the enormous effort during development and maintenance of a large scale and variety of a family of eLearning Systems? The main thrust of this paper is to discuss software engineering aids to address this concern. Firstly, we brief the adult literacy case study and GAMBLE framework that form the basis for discussion in this paper. Then we present two major software engineering aids that we have devised during our experience (i) GAMBLE Platform that integrates multiple reasoning technologies to support modeling instructional material in the form of data (facts, cases, rules, models - fcrm) and an interactive environment GURU for both teachers and learners alike to enrich their teaching/learning experience (ii) Applying software product lines to address scale and variety challenges of educational technologies. Finally, we succinctly present Lean Software Product Lines as a potential future direction. The discussion in this paper is based on analyzing and improving a decade-long technology for adult literacy for over four and half years.