INDIeAuthor: A Metamodel-Based Textual Language for Authoring Educational Courses

This paper presents the INDIeAuthor authoring tool, which has been developed at the Digital Content Production Center, Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT). INDIeAuthor has been developed in order for the university to have its own tool that supports all the desired features, in addition to a platform with which to investigate innovative features. When building INDIeAuthor, we have overcome some limitations identified for existing authoring tools: 1) Lack of two essential content reuse mechanisms: defined-user templates and course-independent units; 2) No support to sequence the units on a course; 3) Gamification feature is either very limited or does not exist. Two new aspects of the proposal are: providing a family of four textual domain-specific languages rather than a graphical user interface and applying model-based software engineering techniques during the implementation of the languages. Four essential aspects in the course definition can be specified to the language family: content, assessment, gamification, and sequencing. We discuss the benefits of representing courses as models and present two utilities developed as a proof of concept. This paper also contributes with the definition of a feature model that establishes a conceptual framework in which to compare authoring tools. An evaluation of INDIeAuthor is also presented: a case study was carried to evaluate the language characteristics, and the tool is contrasted with eight widely-used authoring tools. This paper presented here is the baseline of INDIe Erasmus+ European project that is currently ongoing.