Collaborative courseware authoring and publishing based on WebDAV, XML, and XSLT

Teaching and learning is naturally an interactive, recursive, and iterative process. Consequently, the courseware is almost always changing during the whole teaching and learning process, which makes courseware authoring and publishing more complicated. In addition, with today´s use of Web-enabled global cooperation in education, courseware authoring and publishing is further becoming a collaborative process due to the necessary cooperation among geographically dispersed partner universities. In this paper, we present a courseware authoring and publishing system which has been practically applied in a joint course held both at the University of Hannover and the Free University of Bozen. We adopt a recent collaboration-friendly Internet protocol, WebDAV, to support collaborative courseware authoring, the markup-language XML to represent meta-data of course contents, and the stylesheet language XSLT to accomplish courseware presentation. With its simple syntax, XML can, on the one hand, simplify the courseware authoring and structuring process. On the other hand, as a neutral meta-language, it can also separate course contents from courseware presentation when used with XSLT.