Abstract:

Lesson plans help teachers to organize content, materials and methods for their teaching and these items need to be tailored to accommodate diverse abilities, previous knowledge and motivations among students. Currently there is little support for teachers to determine suitable lesson plans based on their particular classroom situation. Since lesson plans usually have a standard requirement for content, support can be made through the implementation of a web based lesson planning system whereby best practice in preparing lesson plans can be shared among teachers. However, to simply use other teachers’ lesson plans is often not practicable because of the various factors and constraints that need to be considered. Therefore, teachers have to customise existing lesson plans that are retrieved from the system. It is often less time consuming to customise an existing plan then to generate a new one from scratch. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a methodology for finding solutions that solved similar problems to the current problem. It offers a potential framework for a lesson planning system for teachers. In the terminology of CBR, a case is made of a problem description and a solution that solves the problem. Solving a problem by CBR involves obtaining a problem description from the user, calculating the similarity of the current problem to previous problems stored in a case-base, retrieving one or more cases that have similar problems and attempting to reuse the solution of one of the retrieved cases, possibly after adapting it to account for differences in the problems. Choosing an appropriate methodology is essential to structure, plan, and control the process of developing a web based lesson planning system (LPS) based on CBR concept. ,Therefore, a combination and modification of two methodologies were proposed. Although there are methodologies available for CBR system development, they are more suitable for industrial applications where tangible things are produced based on standards and formulae. However, in education, particularly in lesson planning teachers are dealing with people and responsible to develop the potential of each one from different background and with different abilities. The methodology to develop a system for lesson plans construction consists of five phases: identification, conceptualisation, formalization, implementation and evaluation. These will be discussed in this paper with emphasises on the formalization phase. Main activities in this phase are the design of application, architecture, platform and user interface. All of these will be elaborated in details.

Keywords:

Lesson planning system, system development methodology, case based reasoning, formalisation, application design, architectural design.