Abstract:

In recent years, web-based e-Learning education has become increasingly relevant at all stages of education. Teachers often rely on different e-Learning systems, such as Learning Management Systems (LMSs), in order to make course materials available to students as well as to encourage class participation through online quizzes and interactive activities. Moreover, a significant amount of teaching institutions have started to publicly offer part of their curriculum online in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

An example of an e-Learning system is ViSH (http://vishub.org), a social and collaborative platform focused on the creation and sharing of open educational resources. Currently, ViSH includes two e-Learning authoring tools that allow registered users to create and publish learning objects. An e-Learning authoring tool is a piece of software that helps teachers with no programming skills to create complete educational resources in a simple way. Usually, the content generated with these tools is compliant with some e-Learning standard, such as SCORM, allowing its reusability and interoperability across different LMSs. All educational resources elaborated with ViSH’s authoring tools can be published on its educational repository enabling their use by the educational community.

This paper describes how the ViSH platform has been improved by integrating a new extensible e-Learning authoring tool called Ediphy. Ediphy allows authors to create different types of educational resources, such as webpages and slides. These resources can be structured in different sections in order to make up a whole course syllabus compliant with SCORM. Thus, the content generated with this authoring tool can be used in a great range of e-Learning scenarios. Ediphy allows for the insertion of a wide variety of content into learning resources through its collection of plugins. These plugins are independent modules that allow for an easy extension of the capabilities of the tool by the open source community.

The details of the integration of Ediphy into ViSH are explained in this paper, along with the complete set of benefits that this authoring tool provides to the e-Learning platform. The new version of ViSH was deployed for users to try out. Furthermore, several educational resources made with Ediphy were published as a sample, which can be downloaded and incorporated into MOOCs or taken as a base to develop new resources. A survey was conducted among a reduced group of ViSH users in order to gather their opinions on the new authoring tool, whose results are presented in this paper.

Keywords:

e-learning, authoring tools, virtual learning environments, computer aided instruction.