The new programming technologies allow for the creation of components which can be automatically or manually assembled to reach a new experience in knowledge understanding and mastering or in getting skills for a specific knowledge area. A Visual C# .NET implementation under development is discussed.learning component, user control, automatic assembly, adaptor

Gheorghe RUXANDA

Ion SMEUREANU

English

Research Papers in Economics

Revista Informatica Economică, nr. 3 (43)/2007  14 
Innovative Digital Learning 
 
Ion SMEUREANU, Bucharest, Romania, smeurean@ase.ro
Gheorghe RUXANDA, Bucharest, Romania, ghrux@ase.ro
 
The new programming technologies allow for the creation of components which can be auto-
matically or manually assembled to reach a new experience in knowledge understanding and 
mastering or in getting skills for a specific knowledge area. A Visual C# .NET implementation 
under development is discussed. 
Key-words: learning component, user control, automatic assembly, adaptor. 
 
ntroduction 
E-
nique
learning groups methods and tech-
s, traditional or computer aided (like 
multimedia processing, asynchronous or syn-
chronous communication, web pages, large 
databases etc.) assisting the subject in the 
learning process. 
In 1997 Maddux, Johnson and Willis pro-
vided a simplified approach for educational 
software classification; they defined two ap-
plication type levels: 
•  First level includes software applications 
which are targeted for an easier, more intense 
and more efficient delivering of the same 
knowledge as in the classic method. The user 
involvement  is low, the software pre-
determines almost all  that is going on the 
display; interaction between user and com-
puter is pre-configured by the software au-
thor; user contribution complies with a pre-
determined scenario; applications aim to ac-
quire knowledge by memorizing. 
•  Second level applications mean new and 
more efficient learning techniques. They allow 
more active involvement of the user; the user 
controls everything that happens; user-
computer interaction is driven by user at run-
time; there is an extended range of inputs and 
actions accepted by the computer; creative ac-
tions prevail. 
2. E-learning and innovation: component 
learning model  
In practice, as in specialized literature, the 
concept of learning object is intensely used, 
but it is not strictly defined. A learning object 
is defined as any entity, digital or non-digital, 
that may be used for learning, education or 
training (IEEE, 2002); it can be reused or ref-
erenced any time in a computer-based learn-
ing process. Examples of such objects are 
prints, studies, exercises, texts, audio lessons,  
courses, curricula etc. 
The  learning component is an object im-
plementing interfaces; these interfaces make 
it able to recognize other related objects with 
which it can interact inside a semantic net-
work. Functionally, the components are 
small executable pieces which interact with 
each other even during the design time of a 
client application; they complete one an-
other, they bring themselves new properties 
and references through which they connect, 
"coupling" and acting as a whole (this is 
where the term component comes from). 
The success of new learning technologies is 
related to the paradigm-shift, from traditional 
content-centered and instructor-led models 
towards an interactive focus on the 
teacher/learner. Component-based learning 
is the process of assembling existing soft-
ware components in an application in such 
a way that they interact to get a prede-
fined functionality. 
The task of content management is partially 
accomplished by learning components, in a 
way that innovative digital learning objects 
can be developed; they are capable to inter-
pret, contextualize and react depending on 
the architecture where they are assembled. 
The  semantic model can be partially sup-
plied by the human subject because learning 
components can be assembled manually, so 
as to provide a large opportunity both for 
students and professors to exercise their crea-
tivity and vision, and to conceive and de-
velop learning resources by themselves. An 
important feature of e-learning systems based 
on learning components is that both teachers 
I Revista Informatica Economică, nr. 3 (43)/2007  15
and learners can become active producers 
of educational content. Tools for high qual-
ity content authoring are already available 
and anyone with enough creativity can com-
pete in innovation. Component-based educa-
tion requires active engagement of students' 
effort over an extended period of time, pro-
gressive and innovative. The students ex-
periment, learn from failures, reply to the 
challenges and become deeply involved. 
Even the homework can be delivered as 
component-based activities. 
Objects used for learning exist and cooperate 
at different levels of granularity. We no 
longer talk of individual objects, but of learn-
ing frameworks that can work in two inter-
changeable modes: 
–  author,  when professor and student cre-
ate and test training applications; 
–  reader, when already authored lessons 
are experienced. 
The framework has to support two kinds of  
processes:  the decomposition of learning 
objects into their components as well as the 
automatic or manual assembly of these 
components in real-world applications. It is 
not enough that learning objects satisfy some 
formal criteria of coupling/decoupling; the 
aggregation must also be pedagogically ef-
fective. The coupling /decoupling of learning 
objects is a considerable challenge, mixing 
ideas from pedagogy and software engineer-
ing [4]; the challenge is to attain new signifi-
cance by composing reusable components; 
some advantages are revealed in the example 
below, which is about learning objects for 
mathematics. 
Personalizing the learning process means 
creating a development plan that is perfectly 
adapted to the knowledge level, needs, ex-
pectations, personal pace and learning habit 
of the student. Intelligent e-learning systems 
aim to implement customized learning mod-
els; a personalized course can be configured 
by automatically selecting and sequencing 
the needed learning components. 
Components are running since client applica-
tion design, therefore they can automate  a 
significant part of  component-coupling, in 
the way that the application requires. Part of 
the properties is browsable and therefore can 
be visually modified by mouse right-click ac-
tions, without writing code or with minimal 
programming effort. 
Components benefit of abstractization using 
interfaces, which standardize communication 
and force components to respect minimal 
communication rules that are generally ac-
cepted (like IComponent inherited by an user 
control,  IDataObject for drag and drop ac-
tion). 
 
public class EvalExpresCtrl : Sys-
tem.Windows.Forms.UserControl, IDataObject 
{ 
   public EvalExpresCtrl()  {InitializeComponent();} 
   
[Browsable(true),EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsab
leState.Always),Category("Custom")] 
   public string ExpressionLatex 
      { get{ return latExpression;}  set   {latExpres-
sion=value;}   } 
   public string[] GetFormats(bool autoConvert)  
      { 
        if (autoConvert)  {  return new string[] { "Math", 
"Latex","Bitmap", DataFormats.Text};   }  
        else  {   return GetFormats(); } 
      } 
/* .... */ 
} 
 
 By running in a virtual machine the compo-
nents are no longer platform-dependent; the 
components adapt themselves to new ver-
sions, inconsistencies due to versioning thus 
vanishing. Components can be easily reused 
and rapidly integrated in new applications, 
without the need of implementation details, 
only by knowing the coupling interface. A 
schematic structure of an educational com-
ponent is represented in the figure 1. 
 
Fig. 1 Learning component structure 
Learning component metadata 
Learning component 
Interface 
Refers to 
Content 
Methods 
 
Learning objects are self-contained, bearing 
information about themselves, which allow Revista Informatica Economică, nr. 3 (43)/2007  16 
to be independently dragged in another loca-
tion where they are perfectly integrated. It is 
because of this that every learning object en-
capsulates metadata; these metadata  ensure: 
resource identification (by title, version, re-
source type), indexing for fast searches 
(keywords, author), exposing owned formats 
or newly available formats using converters, 
publishing accepted facilities etc. 
From the point of view of educational strate-
gies, having a warehouse with such compo-
nents is not enough; using metadata and in-
terfaces it is very hard to depict all possible 
semantic relationships because of the diver-
sity of educational processes. 
Visual .NET environment offers at the mo-
ment, one of the most interesting models for 
components aggregation and communication. 
In addition, it facilitates objects storing 
(ADO.NET), Web forms design (ASP.NET) 
or distributed services requesting (Web Ser-
vices). .NET provides a dynamic publishing 
and subscribing mechanism. The .NET 
components are executables, therefore they 
know (or they can find about) their interop-
erability characteristics at runtime in a de-
termined context; consequently they can pub-
lish their interface. A classic example is a 
graphing component that can subscribe to a 
varying number of external mathematical 
functions or, in his turn, ask for data from a 
table object.  
3. Practical approach 
A telling example can be an application for 
mathematics training; it raises enough prob-
lems so that the definition, the integration 
and learning object handling will be made 
clear. A schematic interaction of objects used 
in such case is represented in figure 2. 
 
 
Fig. 2 Component interaction in figuring out the function concept 
Learning object diversity is extremely 
large; we just point out the most representa-
tive types of components, in order to easier 
understand component assembling ways and 
typical application structures.  
A. Content – is the skeleton of an applica-
tion, offering generic support for an architec-
ture aiming a clear learning goal; usually 
consists in a hierarchical/graph network for 
logic navigation among inter-related knowl-
edge sets. It expresses the relationship be-
tween learning objects and the syllabus, the 
course or other higher organizing structure in 
which they are delivered. 
B.  Elementary objects usually placed as 
leaves in the tree and having specialized edi-
tors; Text / RichText, Equation, Sound, 
Graph, Image, Animation, Video are the 
most used elementary objects. 
C. Matching mechanism as an abstract class 
managing logical associations between ob-
jects such as belonging to an object set or one 
to one/multiple-choice quizzes.  
D. EvalExpress – mathematical expression 
evaluator  providing support for  runtime 
compilation  and work with parameterized 
functions. The EvalExpress acts as  a mini-
compiler, doing syntactic validations, mem-
ory allocation and dynamic evaluations, dur-
ing the whole execution of  the client appli-
cation. 
 
Fig. 3 EvalExpress – Data Grid interaction 
DB 
Function 
Equation  Text 
EvalExpress 
Table  Chart  Animation 
Text to speech Audio Revista Informatica Economică, nr. 3 (43)/2007  17
E. Converters and adapters aimed to adapt 
the outputs to the coupling interfaces, usually 
calling an overloaded cast operator. The di-
versity of elementary components requires 
bringing them to a common format; even in 
this case, problems remain to be solved, such 
as:  what conversion is preferred when faced 
with multiple choices, which component ini-
tiates conversion at coupling time etc. For in-
stance, the output of Equation component 
working in a visual form, can be a Latex 
string, easily managed, compressed or re-
entered in a visual format for updating; often 
we need conversions from/to formats  ac-
cepted by a wide spread editors, like MS 
Word. Text to speech could be another usual 
converter. 
Another common adapter is a database 
adapter charged with data compression and 
persistence of the objects. It offers a built-in 
mechanism for storing the state of an activity 
or students’ work using component serializa-
tion. Serialization writes at low-level the bi-
nary representation of the .NET component 
content. 
Another usual converter is an XML con-
verter; it offers a structured and text-based 
format for storing and retrieving the state of 
a component aggregation as a support for 
cross platform portability. 
F.  Standalone Application – is an entity 
able to be executed in a standalone play re-
gime on a specific platform. It includes also 
sub-categories "script" and source applica-
tion, written in a programming language and 
becoming platform dependent after compil-
ing and linking. 
G. Function – covers a mathematically im-
portant data type, a continuous function rep-
resented by a method that takes a numeric 
argument and returns a numeric value. In ad-
dition, other attributes of a function are im-
portant, such as the domain over which it is 
defined. The function object offers the possi-
bility to handle mathematical functions by 
analytical expression or by pointer to a li-
brary code; an expression evaluator control 
allows syntactical validation of the analytical 
form. Functions can be viewed using multi-
ple components, such as graphs, visualiza-
tions or tables. 
The new approach is to automate the cou-
pling of components, building an adaptor 
which forces the system to expose only a set 
of safe or desired interfaces for a specific 
context. By exploiting the metadata and par-
tial specification of the learning goalthat 
must be enforced, it can automatically and 
progressively build a centralized adaptor. 
This adapter will mediate contextual interac-
tions among components by both performing 
the specified behavior and simultaneously 
managing possible deadlocks.  
 
Bibliography 
[1]  Cleborne D. Maddux, D. LaMont John-
son, Jerry W. Willis, Educational Comput-
ing: Learning with Tomorrow's Technolo-
gies, Allyn & Bacon; 2001. 
[2]  Wiley, David, A. Connecting learning 
objects to instructional design theory: A 
definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy, Utah 
State University, Digital Learning Environ-
ments Research Group, 2002. 
[3]  Smeureanu, I., Reveiu, A., Dârdală, M., 
Educational Technologies Based on Software 
Components, Informatica Economică, vol. X, 
nr. 3, Editura INFOREC, Bucureşti, 2006. 
[4]  Tom Boyle, Design principles for author-
ing dynamic, reusable learning objects, in 
Australian Journal of Educational Technol-
ogy, 2003, 19(1). 
[5]  math.hws.edu;portal.acm.org;ocw.mit.ed
u; www.epsilonlearning.com. 
 

Connecting learning objects to instructional design theory: A definition, a metaphor, and a taxonomy,

Design principles for authoring dynamic, reusable learning objects,

Innovative digital learning

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Innovative digital learning

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