A collaborative courseware generating system based on WebDAV, XML, and JSP

Today, with the use of global cooperation in education, more and more courses are given directly on the Web in a collaborative manner among geographically dispersed universities. Consequently, Web-based courseware generation is becoming increasingly complicated as this cooperation also introduces additional challenges for the courseware authoring and publishing process. The authors present a courseware generating system which focuses on facilitating the courseware generating process, taking advantage of recent Internet protocols and industry standards. We adopt a collaboration friendly Internet protocol, WebDAV, to support collaborative courseware authoring, XML to represent meta-data of course contents, and JSP to realize dynamic courseware presentation. With its simple syntax, XML can on the one hand simplify the courseware authoring process in company with WebDAV, on the other hand, as a neutral meta-language, it can also separate course contents from courseware presentation in company with JSP.