A Family of Software Product Lines in Educational Technologies
This work addresses the problem of scalable and customizable educational technology development for large-scale applications like adult literacy in India, representing an incremental advancement in applying software product lines to this domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of designing and customizing educational technologies for diverse and evolving requirements, such as varied instructional designs and eLearning systems for multiple languages, by presenting a family of software product lines. It demonstrates this approach for adult literacy in India, generating eLearning systems for Hindi and Telugu that resulted in significant cost savings of 29 person months for 9 systems.
Rapid advances in education domain demand the design and customization of educational technologies for a large scale and variety of evolving requirements. Here, scale is the number of systems to be developed and variety stems from a diversified range of instructional designs such as varied goals, processes, content, teacher styles, learner styles and, also for eLearning Systems for 22 Indian Languages and variants. In this paper, we present a family of software product lines as an approach to address this challenge of modeling a family of instructional designs as well as a family of eLearning Systems and demonstrate it for the case of adult literacy in India (287 million learners). We present a multi-level product line that connects product lines at multiple levels of granularity in education domain. We then detail two concrete product lines (http://rice.iiit.ac.in), one that generates instructional design editors and two, which generates a family of eLearning Systems based on flexible instructional designs. Finally, we demonstrate our approach by generating eLearning Systems for Hindi and Telugu languages (both web and android versions), which led to significant cost savings of 29 person months for 9 eLearning Systems.