Towards Building an Open Digital Library for Instructional Design that Facilitates Reflective e-Instruction

Computer-based instruction, online or offline, which we will be referring at as einstruction, provides for the development of new flexible pedagogical frameworks that will offer opportunities for open worldwide lifelong instruction. We claim that these are to be stored in instructional digital libraries in order to be accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. While many advances have been made in the creation of digital libraries, there is considerable room both for improving how learning objects are accessed/re-used by educators and learners, and for enhanced support for instruction design and for implementation of sound instructional systems. We present here our ongoing work that aims to build a core instructional design digital library for reflective, learner-centered, e-instruction and to make it available to its potential users. Firstly, we describe our model for e-instruction design and its support tool. We present further on a construction scheme for storing this evolving model into a digital library, using the services provided by an open digital library service system, OpenDLib, which has been built at ISTI–CNR Pisa, Italy. We have chosen OpenDLib as a “constructor” for our digital library because it has a powerful document model, it is open, dinamically expandable, and open source. Finally, our research plan that approaches instructional design that facilitates reflective, learner-centered, e-instruction is shown.