Session S3F 0-7803-7961-6/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE November 5-8, 2003, Boulder, CO 33 rd ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference S3F-11 A TEACHER FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT TO FOSTER REUSABILITY AND LEARNER-CENTERED CUSTOMIZATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTERACTIVE EDUCATIONAL PACKAGES Dante Del Corso 1 , Emanuela Ovcin 2 , Gaetano Morrone 3 1 Dante Del Corso, Politecnico di Torino, Dip. di Elettronica, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy, dante.delcorso@polito.it 2 Emanuela Ovcin, COREP, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy, ovcin@lamp.polito.it 3 Gaetano Morrone, COREP, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy, morrone@lamp.polito.it. Abstract  A good teacher is able to “customize” the les- son, in order to fit the requirement and needs of the learners he/she has in front in the classroom. This becomes more difficult and quite expensive in Open and Distance Educa- tion, where customization means the development of similar contents in diversified styles. An automated course compila- tion package which can make this approach affordable has been developed in the 3DE (Design, Development and De- livery - Electronic Environment for Educational Multimedia) project. The actual preparation of custom courses showed the key role of authoring process and styles, and the related problems. This paper introduces the methodology and de- scribes the development environment designed to assist authors in the creation of highly customized educational material. The goal is to make teachers understand the rela- tions among pedagogical and technical aspects, receive instructions, guidelines and assistance for the development of learning-styles aware material. The environment includes a Pedagogical framework, an Authors' guide, a Classifica- tion guide, and a tool to speed up and ease metadata inser- tion in each learning unit. Index Terms  Automated construction, personalized learn- ing, reuse, author’s guide, educational effectiveness. INTRODUCTION It is now widely accepted that in the design and development of educational material, attention must be focused on learner characteristics and requirements. These needs are best ad- dressed by highly customized packages, but producing such material with a good quality puts a heavy load on the au- thors, which, in turn, brings a high cost for the organizations. In addition, the models and the techniques, which allow personalization of courses taking into account the different learning styles and other parameters, are not yet in the tool- box of most authors. Many teachers do not have a clear idea of how they can tune the design to make educational mate- rial more effective. The process is not a mere transposition to the screen of already developed papers, books or slides; proper exploitation of technology can give real added value, and the pedagogical models applied must take into account the use of ICT. Some help comes from recent developments on International Standards in education, such as the Learning Object Meta- data, which rely on concepts like granularity and slicing of knowledge in micromodules or in competence-dependent units. They can assist the classification and handling of educational material. The extensive use of metadata is usu- ally recommended, but, if not supported by proper method- ology and tools, may require from the authors an effort com- parable with the production of the educational material itself. A main issue is therefore to let authors understand what they can do and then explain how they can do it. Although it may seem a rather simple task, explaining the new concepts of communication through technology to an author, who is used to developing paper-based material, can be the most demanding step of the process. Most teachers have experi- ence in face to face education, and they got a clear, personal understanding of how to "teach well" in that situation. When they work on materials for open learning, the environment and the learner’s attitude are different, but it may be hard to change deep-rooted “teaching habits”. So, even if we keep the learner-centered approach to education, a key problem is making the authors understand their new position and how to use the technology. The in- structional designer plays a key role in this process; she/he must be aware both of technological possibilities and expert in pedagogical methods. Most important, she/he must be able to explain to authors how they can re-design their mate- rial in order to reach the best results (in terms of educational efficacy) with a reasonable effort (in terms of time and costs). This process of teaching technical and pedagogical methods to teachers must be carried out for each author involved in the creation of multimedia interactive educa- tional material. To speed-up this process and to avoid repeti- tive tasks for the instructional designers, a teacher friendly development environment has been set up at LAMP [1], the Multimedia Laboratory of Polytechnic of Turin and COREP. This paper describes the methodology and the related developmental environment designed to assist authors in the creation of highly customized educational material. In this environment teachers are guided to understand the relations among pedagogical and technical aspects, and receive de- tailed instructions, guidelines and assistance, with the sup-