A Generator and a Meta Specification Language for Courseware

Courseware has to reflect the learning situation coined by contents, learning goals, characteristics of the learner, technical conditions etc. The efficient creation of appropriately designed courseware relies on flexible representations of reusable instructional material and learning circumstances. Contradictory approaches of different instructional design schools give little advice in case of design alternatives: The support gap for justified design decisions ranges from underlying instructional theory to ergonomic layout. Therefore, we separated factors influencing courseware design from design parameters and present the Instructional Material Description Language IMDL for their respective description. A simple rule language serves to express dependencies between influence factors and design parameters. Rule sets represent prescriptive design statements based on instructional design theory which are open for validation. A toolset enables efficient courseware production based on IMDL, e.g. an interpreter engine for rules produces complete courseware specifications and a generator outputs source code for specified courseware based on a framework of instructional Java-BeansTM.