A Study of Standardization of Traditional Teaching Materials

 As internet usage becomes more popular over the world, e-learning system has been accepted globally in the past ten years. E-learning system can make learner study at any time and any location conveniently. However, because the teaching materials in different e-learning systems are usually defined in specific data format, the sharing of the teaching materials among these systems becomes difficult, resulting in increasing the cost of creating teaching materials. To solve the issue of uniform teaching materials format, several standard formats including SCORM, IMS , AICC , and LOM , etc. have been proposed by international organizations. However, how to create the standard teaching materials is an important issue. Although most of approaches usually offer an authoring tool to help users, authoring standard teaching materials is still time-consuming, even though to often practice it. In addition, the traditional teaching material without concept of learning object is difficult to offer appropriate teaching materials for students in accordance with their aptitudes. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a Content Transformation Engine based upon the concept of learning object to segment the traditional teaching materials into several objects. The original teaching materials are divided into several objects according to the instructional objectives defined by teachers or educational experts. Moreover, we adopt the SCORM standard to present the learning object with Extensible Markup Language (XML) format in each teaching material for achieving the reusing, sharing, and interoperability of these learning objects. For offering an authoring tool to edit SCORM based teaching material, we also develop a browser based authoring tool to help authors edit SCORM compliant teaching materials. By the verification of open test, our develop transformation engine can efficiently transform traditional teaching materials into SCORM standard. Index Terms  E-Learning, Learning Object, Reusability, SCORM, Traditional Teaching Material.