A documentation approach for higher education

Systematic documentation is an important aspect in order to preserve information that would otherwise be lost over time. Documentation is needed in different disciplines, but is not so common in education and especially in software engineering's education. Education is a very diverse field. Situations (e.g. education procedures and their contents) which are meaningful to document must be detected first, which implies a need for a flexible documentation environment. One main problem is, we have different situations (which are worth to be documented) and we need a concept to document each situation in a flexible way. Usually documentation patterns (documentation templates) are used to document a specific situation or a group of specific situations, so the usage of one given pattern for many different situations could be problematic. That is why there is a need for another concept to document such situations. The paper presents a documentation approach which reverses the typical concept of documentation patterns. Usually patterns are given first for specific problems. This paper presents a flexible approach which let documentarists create their own pattern for their specific situations which may solve the named problem.