A Model for Distributed Curriculum on the World Wide Web

Educational material abounds on the Web, but still most designers of instructional material must start from scratch. Emerging interoperability standards for educational resources will accelerate progress toward reusability of this material. We describe a framework called Model for Distributed Curriculum (MDC) that uses a topic server architecture to allow one Web-based tutorial to include a specification for another tutorial, a “virtual tutorial”, where the best fit to this specification will automatically be found at run time. This allows a designer of instructional material to re-use other Web-based tutorials without having to know what tutorials will exist at run time, i.e. without having to search and analyze material on the Web. Key to MDC is organizing Web-based curriculum into a “topic space” rather than a “page space,” and making use of emerging metadata standards for educational resources to describe the pedagogically relevant properties of Web-based tutorials. Reviewers: Franz Schmalhofer (U. Kaiserslautern), Markus Stolze (IBM Research), Arthur Stutt (Open U.)