Hierarchy-Based Methodology for Producing Educational Contents with Maximal Reutilization R. Pedraza-Jiménez, F. Valverde-Albacete, J. Cid-Sueiro, H. Molina-Bulla, and A. Navia-Vázquez. Dept. of Signal Theory and Communications. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. SPAIN rpedraza@tsc.uc3m.es , fva@tsc.uc3m.es , jcid@tsc.uc3m.es , hmolina@tsc.uc3m.es , navia@tsc.uc3m.es ABSTRACT Computer based training or distance education are facing dramatic changes with the advent of standardization efforts, some of them concentrating in maximal reuse. This is of paramount importance for a sustainable -cost affordable- production of educational materials. Reuse in itself should not be a goal, though, since many methodological aspects might be lost. In this paper we propose two content production approaches for the InterMediActor platform under a competence-based methodology: either a bottom-up approach where content is designed from scratch or a top-down methodology where existing material can be gradually adapted to fulfil requisites to be used with maximal flexibility into InterMediActor. Keywords.- Distance and computer-based education and learning. Content production and reuse. 1 INTRODUCTION Content production is one of the ‘hot topics’ in computer-based training because it often represents a large percentage of the total amount of effort needed for the deployment of this type of educational systems. Firstly, efficient and flexible content specification methodologies are needed to maximally facilitate automatically reuse of the materials developed under certain methodology. In this sense, initial efforts are being conducted (SCORM [2], IEEE LOM [3], IMS [4]) but, from our point of view they present some serious deficiencies. But, on the other hand, tons of legacy content is already available in most organizations and interested parties are often reluctant to starting from scratch the content provision task. Unfortunately, the unstructured (i.e., non-standard) nature of this contents often prohibits its direct reuse in any new platform/tool. Our concern here focuses in the concept of reuse in a broad sense, i.e., taking into account already existing materials to be integrated into any newly deployed platform. In this paper we revisit the problem of content production and reuse: we briefly review the competence-based methodology proposed for our distance and computer-based education platform InterMediActor [1], currently under development, and propose a hierarchy model for content production and reutilization of already existing material.