Specialization and Instantiation Aspects of a Standard Process for Developing Educational Modules

Educational modules can be seen as relevant mechanisms to improve the learning processes in general. The goal is to produce quality educational products, capable of motivating the learners and effectively contribute to their knowledge construction process. Despite their relevance, none of the initiatives to address the problem of creating educational modules considers a systematic process for developing them. The establishment of a well-defined set of guidelines and supporting mechanisms should ease the distributed and cooperative work to create, reuse and evolve educational modules, taking also into account the impact on the learning process. In this work we present a standardized process we have established aiming at creating well-designed, highly flexible and configurable educational modules. We focus on the aspects of process specialization and instantiation, illustrating the practical application of the instantiated process by the development of an educational module for teaching the fundamentals of software testing. Particularly, the availability of learning facilities, allied to the development of testing tools, should facilitate the apprenticeship of specific testing theories and skills, promoting better dissemination conditions to the practical evaluation and application of testing strategies, both in academic and industrial sets. The produced module has been applied and preliminarily evaluated in terms of the learning effectiveness. The results obtained give us some evidences on the practical use of the standard process as a supporting mechanism to the development of effective educational modules.