Session F2F 978-1-4244-1970-8/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE October 22 – 25, 2008, Saratoga Springs, NY 38 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2F-1 Providing Instructional Layers of Abstraction in Authoring Tools For Engineering Education Content Miguel Rodríguez-Artacho UNED University, miguel@lsi.uned.es Fco. Javier Velasco García Secondary ed. teacher, JaviVelasco@amena.com Abstract - In the context of the authoring process of educational material in e-learning, the notion of learning specification has been considered the fundamental step for the development of an e-learning industry, based on reusability and interoperability of interchangeable components. However, when considering authoring based on instructional and pedagogical aspects, it is necessary to avoid being driven by LT specifications, and better rely on an abstract reference model based on instructional semantics. This paper proposes this instructional layer stack to provide independence from content specification in the authoring process and develop an authoring tool based on it with exporting capabilities to IMS specifications. Index Terms – Authoring tools, learning technologies standards, educational modeling languages, PALO language. INTRODUCTION The authoring of learning content and the development of formal specifications to model this educational content is one of the main issues in learning technologies (LT) research [1][3]. The variety of specifications developed so far strongly facilitate the creation of reusable learning objects providing structure, packaging and sequencing attending to pedagogical and instructional patterns, including the definition of complex instructional tasks. This complexity includes the development of authoring modules embedded in virtual learning environments (VLE) provided with interesting searching functions but in general many months behind the state of the art in LT specifications. In the early times of LT specifications, researchers shared the notion of LOs as a simple content "brick" to build learning content by mean of a process of aggregation. This model classifies LOs into a hierarchy of aggregation levels depending on its size and on the pedagogical information attached, based on the granularity. Despite most of the current research projects on LT are based on LO repositories, the main drawback of this model has to deal with a trade-off between granularity, cataloging effort and suitability to reuse [7]. Although the less granularity, the more suitable for reusing, it is also known that it will be less likely to preserve its pedagogical context and be suitable in all of them, apart of the effort needed to catalog it. But in fact this is only one of the drawbacks of a model that do not distinguish how to represent different kind of instructional information and make it explicitly differenced from the learning content itself contained in the LO. Additionally, many critics to LOs are based on the inability to model in a flexible way the learning processes and methods of the learning material, and the lack of a pedagogical context. It is also remarkable the difficulty to combine coherently different LT specifications jointly with the use of LO as components for building tailored educational material. In this sense, in the framework of LT specification and authoring tools development there is currently a need to structure and link with instructional patterns the recent specification paradigms obtained from the LT research [5][4]. In this context some of the results in LT -as the notion of Learning Object- have been extrapolated from a variety of well known computational paradigms like reusable component as a software engineering concept, providing structured reusable elements labeled with metadata, and also from knowledge engineering, allowing content organization using knowledge-based structures like ontologies or semantic web development. On the other hand, from the cognitive sciences perspective, the adoption during the 50s and 60s of some instructional theories based on cognition have obtained useful abstractions to specify appropriate methods and situations in which those are to be applied during learning process [6]. But authoring tools (and also instructional theories, as mentioned in [6]) have not evolved in a parallel way to be instructional aware, and still focus strongly on LT specifications and implement a LT specifications' syntax driven approach to implement the process of authoring. In this sense we consider authoring tools should provide an instructional view, independent from the specification format of the learning content. Such a reference model was initially developed for PALO, an educational modeling