RECAL: Architecting Teaching Materials for the Future David Dewhurst, Rachel Ellaway, Stewart Cromar Assistant Principal (e-learning & e-health) Director of Learning Technology College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, The University of Edinburgh

Problem: technical obsolescence - the CAL graveyard

The Problem Multimedia CAL mainstay of e-learning during 1980s, early 1990s educational content intrinsically tied to run-time engine – not editable required continual re-development as operating systems and applications were upgraded - re-development is costly and time-consuming Multimedia CAL development

The Curse of the Runtime PEDAGOGY RESOURCES SEQUENCING

Set your CAL program free! You lose nothing but your chains … RUNTIME PEDAGOGY RESOURCES SEQUENCING

Content authoring – the future? SSE -- simple sequencing engine Existing CALs are disaggregated to release assets Teacher selects assets from repository Simple authoring tools used to create new CALs from existing assets

RECAL – abstracting the assets RECAL separates the assets from the runtime. CAL programs disaggregated to release assets for reuse.

RECAL - separating resources from run-time

Although the RECAL user experience is identical to the traditional version, it actually is made up of multiple re-usable assets. In this example 1 locked CAL compared to 1 RECAL with at least 6 assets.

RECAL – dynamic CAL creation RECAL player pulls in assets dynamically from repository Sequencing is determined by XML files

RECAL – editing is easy Assets can be changed/revitalised New assets can be added Enables easy creation of different language versions Enables easy updating and local contextualisation

RECAL – sequencing the learning External parameter files (XML) dictate the page sequence and the content delivered to the user. Different templates can be used to build the assets into each page: T1 - Title T2 - Image&Text T3 - Trace T4 - MCQ

Managing the assets Assets are stored on a server Each asset has a corresponding entry in a database. Metadata is attached to assets to allow authors to browse and search. Assets are available for use in multiple CALs.

RECAL – scalability and flexibility Authors can build learning activities using templates and assets RECAL player imports the sequence and assets and dynamically creates the resource. Assets can be easily shared between authors New resources can be quickly built from existing components.

RECAL: Architecting Teaching Materials for the Future … thank you David Dewhurst david.dewhurst@ed.ac.uk RECAL www.recal.mvm.ed.ac.uk