Authoring software in special education

Abstract

The limited quantity and quality of existing software (courseware) restricts the use of computers in today's special educational environments. Special educators are often reluctant to become involved with the development of new courseware because of the high costs associated with courseware development. Therefore in this paper we are focussing on procedures for the development of Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) lessons. Three primary techniques to help authors produce CAI lessons are the use of traditional programming languages, authoring languages, and authoring systems. These techniques are defined and compared. For our study we concentrated on those authoring systems which require no programming from the user and which provide a courseware generator for special teachers to enter their own content. These authoring systems can be divided into three categories according to the type of CAI lesson they support. Criteria are also given for selecting between the authoring systems.An Authoring Courseware Development Model (ACDM) is proposed to guide the development of authored lessons. According to this model the development of special CAI lessons is separated into four phases: lesson design, lesson authoring, lesson testing and lesson documentation. It is hoped that by using this model from beginning to end, teachers will be rewarded for their time and effort with lesson products that can be used over time with students with learning difficulties.KeywordsInstructional DesignAuthoring SystemAuthoring ToolSpecial TeacherInstructional TextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.