Abstract:The management of the infrastructure and content of the World Wide Web is a growing problem for the development of web-based educational applications (WbEA) and is hidden beneath the tremendous benefits of the web. Moreover, such systems undergo more frequent and quite extensive changes in their development and operational period because the client's perception (either the learner, the teacher or institutional organisation) of the complete end product is a 'moving target'. So, there is a need for a disciplined approach to managing the evolution of web-based educational applications. Such a disciplined approach as applied throughout the software engineering process is called software configuration management (SCM). This paper begins a discussion of how the development of web-based educational applications could benefit from SCM techniques and tools and proposes a model for the management of the evolution of such systems. The model couples the development and evolution process of WbEA configurations into one framework, which seems promising for the implementation of a configuration management process. Also, the model focuses on the development of the web-based educational content, defining the configurations of the items involved in the underlying process. Finally, an example is given to demonstrate the benefits of the use of this approach.Keywords: web-based educational applications; software configuration management; version control; learning technology systems; e-learning; learning resources; learning management systems; instructional design; evaluation.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Psaromiligkos, Y.
An approach for managing the evolution of web-based
149Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. His research interests are in web engineering and software configuration management, web-based learning environments, evaluation methodologies for web-based systems, object-oriented programming and modelling. He is the author of several papers and serves on the editorial board of international journals.Dr. Symeon Retalis is an Associate Professor at the Department of Technology Education & Digital Systems, University of Piraeus. He holds a diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Studies, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, an MSc in information technology-knowledge based systems from the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. His research interests lie in the development of web-based learning systems, the design of adaptive hypermedia systems, web engineering and human computer interaction. He is the author of several papers, serves in the editorial board of international journals and participates to special interest groups on web engineering.