Accelerating educational technologies using software product lines

The need for educational technologies is present everywhere, to aid in teaching illiterates of India spread across 22 Indian Languages, computer literacy, vocational training, school education from K1 to K12, engineering education, and they occur as families to handle diverse content, multiple languages and varied contexts. Considering an average effort of 2 person years for developing a typical technology-driven solution, how much amount of effort is required to develop and maintain technology-driven solutions for a large scale and variety of systems based on varying content, language? Unfortunately, this challenge of developing and maintaining technology-driven solutions in Technology for Education (T4E) community is often seen as content development and infrastructure management, and software engineering ideas are seldom applied. In this poster, we briefly summarize our experience of mining a software product line from 9 existing eLearning Systems (for adult literacy). Software Product Lines (SPL) is an interesting paradigm to improve software productivity by focusing on a family of similar but distinct products tailored to customers' needs. We then present the need for a light-weighted, integrated approach to software product lines and briefly outline Lean Software Product Lines as a preliminary research direction to address the scale and variety inherent in educational technologies domain.