Object-Oriented Web-Based Courses Development through XML

Web-based methodology has become a new paradigm for constructing computer assisted learning system. While HTML is a data representation language; so HTML-based courseware is machine-readable but not machine-understandable. The lack of suitable abstraction makes it difficult to construct frameworks for retrieving reusable pieces from HTML documents of different Web-based courses. Therefore, the development of Web-based courses is still mostly ad hoc. There still lack of a rigorous, systematic approach, and most current Web-based courses development and management practices rely on the knowledge and experience of individual developers. In this paper, we present an XML-cell based approach to construct Web-based courses, which is capable of improving the development and reusability of Web-based courses material by applying component oriented methodology and XML. In our approach, each curriculum element is encapsulated into an XML-cell, which is the basic component of a Web-based course, and the relative XML-cells can be aggregated into course units according to the course templates. So it will provide a systematic way for developing Web-based courses. Two useful tools are also developed. XML-wrapper is used to encapsulate structured information into marked-up information. You can cut and paste (or drag and drop) an HTML pieces into the wrapper area, assign the cell-template and add your customized properties; after that the XML-wrapper will construct the XML-cell. Another tool is X-Cell manager that is a Design-time Control module. With X-cell manager, you can browse the XML-cell base and select the reuse cell that you need.