Wiki-based rapid prototyping for teaching-material design in e-Learning grids

Grid computing environments with abundant resources can support innovative e-Learning applications, and are promising platforms for e-Learning. To support individualized and adaptive learning, teachers are encouraged to develop various teaching materials according to different requirements. However, traditional methodologies for designing teaching materials are time-consuming. To speed up the development process of teaching materials, our idea is to use a rapid prototyping approach which is based on automatic draft generation and Wiki-based revision. This paper presents the approach named WARP (Wiki-based Authoring by Rapid Prototyping), which is composed of five phases: (1) requirement verification, (2) query expansion, (3) teaching-material retrieval, (4) draft generation and (5) Wiki-based revision. A prototype system was implemented in grid environments. The evaluation was conducted using a two-group t-test design. Experimental results indicate that teaching materials can be rapidly generated with the proposed approach. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.