Collaborative Authoring of Learning Elements for Adaptive Learning Spaces

The Software Organization Platform (SOP) intends to support specific software engineering activities such as experience management, requirements engineering, or project management. Wiki pages can be easily used by a transformation engine to produce so-called learning elements. Learning elements are the building blocks of adaptive learning spaces, which enhance experience application and understanding in software engineering. This paper shows how learning content is collaboratively authored in the MediaWiki-based SOP in order to generate adaptive learning spaces. The authoring tool, which is embedded as an extension in SOP itself, helps the authors to annotate the learning elements with keywords from the SWEBOK ontology (available in OWL). In addition, a vocabulary manager supports the development of a pre-defined metadata set for annotating learning elements. The authoring environment is a promising technology for solving the problem of “closed content corpus” and uses the advantages of ontologies and semantic relationships in Wikis.