What are didactic materials

Didactic materials are any kind of aid that assists those actors to
achieve
Their objectives during the entire learning process. There are two types of
didactic materials according to the actors of the educational process:
teaching materials and learning materials. Learning materials are those
assets or resources that support learners during the process of learn-ing
(e.g., books, games, worksheets, etc.). On the other hand, teaching ma-
terials provide academic staff with resources to guide and support the
learning process of students.

Perspectives on the development of didactic materials

There is a number of perspectives needed to take into consideration when
we are concerned with the development or creation of didactic mate-rials.
Those views ensure desirable features of didactic materials for the
deployment of any educational process. We can summarize them in the
following features:
Reusability
Embedded or associated semantic character
Collaboration support
And others such as quality and usability.

1. Reusability and the semantic interoperability

The reusability character of didactic materials is based on their capabil-ity
to be used in different learning situations or in diverse knowledge do-mains.
The reusability and the embedded or associated semantic character are
closely related features. Reusability can be achieved if didactic mate-rials
have embedded or associated some kind of semantic information. It means
that designers and developers of didactic materials should include semantic
information related to the use, format, learning objectives, learn-ing
audience, knowledge domain, among others within the design of such
materials. Thus, other designers or developers with similar needs can re-
trieve and compare that semantic information with their current require-
ments in order to decide if they reuse that didactic material.

2.Ontologies in Education

Ontologies define formal and real-world semantics for information, in order
to make it machine-suitable for processing content with meaning . They also
provide a correlation between the information model and the real world
domain they represent, supplying a vocabulary (i.e. a lan-guage of types and
terms that has a corresponding formal semantics) and allowing to express
the entities and relationships of a conceptual model for a general or
particular domain.

3.Collaboration support
Another important perspective to keep in mind during the development of
didactic materials is collaboration. If we consider the multidisciplinary
character of the didactic material design and the nature and learning re-
quirements of knowledge that is enclosed in any didactic material can
change along time, it is unlikely that a single academic or subject special-ist
can completely generate the whole learning material. Therefore, a group of
specialized actors (i.e. content providers or authors, teachers, tu-tors,
media, system and instructional designers, pedagogical advisors and even
students) should be involved in the development of didactic materi-als.
These roles provide the development process with diverse ideas and
positions on how the materials should be composed and created. Their ideas
represent their expert knowledge on different disciplines, and consti-tute
different views of the process (e.g. artistic, instructional, psychological and
specific domain-related knowledge). Thus, collaborative support is needed
for the development, whereby participants ideas are exchanged, evaluated,
negotiated and as result of such negotiation, didactic material is composed
or created.
Other essential aspect for an adequate collaboration support is a common
language and semantic interpretation among participants needed for a
proper communication that can be provided by Ontologies. There is also
need for a coordination mechanism of the different activities, actors and
the management of task interdependencies. Finally, it is important to con-
trol and trace all the activities involved in the collaboration process.

4. Other perspectives

There are other features, such as quality and usability, which should be
also considered during the development of didactic materials.
According to the overall definition of quality provided by Taguishi [58], the
quality of a didactic material can be defined as the degree in which the
characteristics of the material can cover the felt o pre-felt needs of users
during a period of time.

Collaborative development of didactic materials
In this section we will briefly analyse some related work to the
collaborative development of didactic material.

- The analysis is bases on the view of didactic materials as the conjunction
of learning contents and processes, and according to the perspectives
described above.
Some authors provide approaches for developing didactic materials that
ensure reusability from the multimedia perspective . They introduce the
concept of learning module to represent didactic materials as contents
supported by multimedia techniques. Learning modules can be adapted to
the goals, tasks, interests and other features of users to support
reusability. However, although they clearly outline the development process
of re-usable learning modules, a development methodology is not provided,
and scarce attention is paid to the to the instructional design of didactic
mate-rials and to the collaborative aspects of the development.
Other works are focused on the collaborative nature of the creation and
define a conceptual model for the collaborative development of software.
Such a model resumes and generalizes positive aspects from theoreti-cal
models and theories to support collaborative applications , but the
attention is paid to technological aspects of educational software in-stead
of general and multifold view of didactic materials.The collaboration
support is seamlessly integrated into the development process of the
EdukaLibre project , which provides a software platform to support the
collaborative creation of free educational resources. The col-laborative
development of educational materials is approached from a novel point of
view, i.e. exploring how the common practices of the open source software
community can be translated to the educational content domain. The result
is a web-based application that provides the common functionalities
available in version control systems, but specifically tar-geted to develop
educational documents. The users of the system can choose from a wide
set of editing tools, and the system provides automatic conversions to many
end-user open formats . Nevertheless, the instructional design component
is not considered in the approach, since the subject of development are
documents and content-based resources.
The annotation of learning materials is another relevant task to be con-
sidered in the collaborative development process. Some tools like RELOAD
provide facilities for annotating learning materials with LOM metadata.
Aloha is another similar annotation tool, which is also capable of process-ing
IMS Vocabulary Definition Exchange (IMS VDEX) files . Aloha de-fines the
metadata workflow as the process involved in the creation of a metadata
record, which is a first step towards collaboration facilities. Each user only
annotates those sections related to her expertise domain, and the whole
process is the result of integrating annotations from all us-ers.
Works related to collaborative and semantic annotation are also profuse in
other fields, which can be harnessed by the e-learning development tools.
For instance, the Annotea project provides an RDF-based editing and
browsing collaborative annotation tool of Web resources, called Amaya,
developed as a supporting prototype of the W3C Semantic Web
specifications . The annotation metadata can be stored either locally or in
annotation servers and any client capable of understanding such meta-data
can use them. Collaboration in Amaya consists in the opportunity to view
other users annotations on a Web resource.


MD2: Collaborative development of learning material

As we have shown, the development of didactic material is not a trivial task.
It requires training the developer, as well as the support of a devel-opment
methodology and a powerful authoring environment. Authoring environments
and tools are key factors for reducing the development cost of learning
materials. Such rationales are behind the research project called MD2,
which is the Spanish acronym standing for Development Method of Didactic
Materials (and their automation). The goal of MD2 is to provide an
integrated solution to the creation of learning materials by means of the
following approaches:
1. The definition of a method for the collaborative creation of didactic
materials that aims ensuring the reusability nature of learning materials,
improving efficiency and reducing conflicts and coordi-nation issues. Such a
method is the basis for a set of tools that will systematically guide and
assist developers during the entire development process.
2. The elaboration of a quality evaluation framework for a priori test-ing of
educational products in several dimensions usability, educational utility,
interoperability, etc.

The clarity and coherence of the didactic materials structure

Didactic materials are clearly and coherently structured among other
things:
- the title and designed use of the materials are clearly marked at
the beginning (the program, module/course, competences)
- there is a clear table of contents
- the goals of each individual unit are clearly identified
- the content of the materials is logically arranged,
- the conclusion provides a summary or activities for summarizing
- the sources are consistently cited.

Conclusion

In this work we analyzed the development process of technology-supported
didactic materials. Didactic materials are herein considered as the
conjunction of contents and instructional design used to guide learning and
teaching processes. We describe how several features, such as reus-ability,
semantic interoperability, and collaboration support, must be ensured from
the earlier stages of the material creation process. We analyze how these
and related issues can be approached by means of ontologies,and
collaborative work.