Structuring didactic materials on the Web (Struct)

Abstract

There is an universal agreement that the structuring of didactic materials helps the student in his/her learning process when dealing with such materials. It is then important for the teacher or a student to choose among different structures so to use the one that best conveys the desired knowledge. This need is nowadays a priority also in the e-learning world since several e-learning courses exist on the web and many more are created every day. Unfortunately, most of the existing e-learning platforms offer just a single way to organize the course contents (book structure). Whoever is interested in organizing the course contents in a different way (e.g, with a concept map) must use specific tools that are external to the e-learning environment and are often difficult to use. This work presents the details of the tool we have created to overcome the problems and limitations presented above. We have implemented an on-line application, called STRUCT, that allows teachers and students to easily publish didactic materials on the web and to organize them by choosing the most appropriate structure among different alternatives. STRUCT has been built in a way to be easily integrated inside the most popular e-learning platforms such as Moodle or ATutor.