Abstract

Traditional courseware tools produce courseware with property formats. Unfortunately, these formats are incompatible among them. Therefore, the reuse of courseware material is limited to those developed with the same courseware tool. The functionality of a courseware becomes limited to that provided by a specific courseware tool. To solve these problems this paper proposes a framework of software components. The software components are JavaBeans that provide an interchangeable format among courseware tools supporting this specification. It means the components of the framework make possible to reuse courseware contents and functionality among these tools. The reuse is a very desirable practice because it could reduce the courseware development time and cost. The obtained results using the proposed framework are encouraging. Copyright ACM 2002.