Abstract:

The use of web-based educational applications can benefit students, teachers and the whole education system in a wide variety of ways. For instance, these applications can enhance the engagement and learning outcomes of students and can also be used by teachers to provide self-assessment exercises. Furthermore, if these applications are created according to e-Learning standards, they can be easily integrated into virtual learning environments like Moodle or Sakai to provide tracked educational activities.

There are two main ways in which web-based educational applications can be created. On the one hand, teachers without strong computer skills can use e-Learning authoring tools to create complete educational resources by linking together custom content generated with the tool with external resources. On the other hand, web-based educational applications can be created from scratch by developers using web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. A novel technology for the development of interactive web user interfaces that has gained a lot of popularity over the recent years is React, which consists of a component-based JavaScript library. Although the use of authoring tools is the most popular and preferable way to create this type of applications, this approach has a major drawback: the created applications are very limited in terms of customization and functionality. When an educational application is created by using an authoring tool, the type of content that can be integrated and the interactions that can exist between the different components are limited to those allowed by the tool.

Despite the benefits that can arise from developing customized web-based educational applications compliant with e-Learning standards, little work has been done in order to provide developers with resources to facilitate this task. This paper presents RESCORM: a boilerplate for creating SCORM-compliant React applications. This boilerplate consists of a React application that provides developers with a starting point for creating applications compliant with SCORM as well as a testing environment and a set of utilities.

RESCORM has been used by several developers to create educational applications. A survey was conducted in which these developers were asked to rate, among other indicators, their overall opinion and the utility of the boilerplate. The results of this survey are also presented in this paper showing that RESCORM achieved high user acceptance and was perceived as very useful. Moreover, two of the developed applications were used and evaluated in an online course with 365 participants. This paper also presents the results of this evaluation which show that these applications were rated high in terms of usefulness by course participants.

Keywords:

Web-based education, SCORM, React, educational applications, learning objects.