Educational Resources as Digital Products

Abstract

In the paper educational resources are treated as regular digital products. The problem of the production, distribution and sale is addressed, especially concentrating on the production effort, cost and price. An original method of estimating development effort of e-learning resources is described and experimental results are presented. The paper presents also two extensions of the existing structure and implementation of learning objects. The structure of a learning object, although flexible, focuses on reuse, which is insufficient for independent learning. Therefore the first extension is the concept of a teaching object that contains all parts of the educational process, from knowledge presentation, through examples and exercises to final examinations. A teaching object is proposed as an independent subject of sale. Addition of data access methods to learning objects is the second proposed extension that creates a learning component. A model of learning object distribution based on Web services and learning components is proposed.