E-learning Authoring with Docbook and SMIL

Abstract

E-learning content material can be classified as text and multimedia. A common practice is to use text as backbone and multimedia as components to enrich the otherwise text-and-still-images-only documents. Nowadays e-learning content delivery over learning management systems (LMS) is becoming a common practice in academic institutions. Common authoring tools like office suites are good to generate printing format but at present they do not generate easily the interoperable standards used today in LMS (i.e. SCORM, IMS CP and IMS QTI). We propose a user friendly authoring environment to produce IMS interoperable formats, able to be imported in our Sakai based LMS named PoliformaT. We follow the text-based-multimedia-enriched document paradigm using Docbook for text and SMIL for multimedia composition. Both Docbook and SMIL are independent and XML compliant. Docbook’s simple and well structured markup simplifies interoperability with other XML compliant languages, particularly those related to e-learning. In the multimedia side SMIL offers an open and flexible composition capability to author multimedia content for e-learning. The problem that we face with the proposed approaches is the lack of friendly and productive authoring tools. This is the issue we intend to contribute to with this work.