Authoring and Linking of Highly Interactive Content within Web-based Courseware

1 E-Mail: [email protected] Abstract Sophisticated Web-based courseware typically includes highly interactive elements like interactive illustrations or a virtual laboratory together with cooperative tools. The intention is to support active engagement with the teaching content and to educe intuitive understanding by experimentation. However, developing a greater pool of complex experiments or simulations is expensive, even if we base on a toolkit with reusable components: learning content has to be prepared didactically and interlinked with its hypermedia context. The evident task, to decentralize this factual, technical and didactical knowledge and incorporate multiple authors, has not yet been solved for highly interactive content. This contribution discusses interdisciplinary approaches to develop, interlink and modify hypermedia and highly interactive elements and presents an online assistant for virtual experiments as proof of concept.