An educational-oriented framework for building on-line courses using XML

Internet can represent a useful tool for delivering knowledge in distance education scenarios; the real effectiveness of Internet courses, however, depends on the educational design and on the flexibility of the contents, which should adapt to the individual student´s knowledge and needs. We describe the prototype of an educational-oriented authoring tool we developed in the attempt of giving an answer to these issues. The application has been designed in order to produce Internet courses, composed of XML documents, whose content organisation reflects some basic educational principles, such as modularity, possibility of multiple views of the contents, and existence of self-evaluation mechanisms. After the definition of these concepts, the paper describes the structure of the produced courses, that is the “grammar” they should satisfy, and explains in details the architecture of the application