From CD-ROM to Web-served: reverse engineering of an interactive multimedia course

The Web offers advantages for learning technologies, but the interactivity necessary for the learner requires technical features that are currently hardly supported. The authors briefly describe how a traditional multimedia course, usually marketed as offline CD-ROMs, has been reverse engineered to a server-based, multi-client Web application in order to have an identical behaviour at the learner's site. The new course consists of XML/XSL documents programmed by server-driven Java functionalities managing the conversations with the remote learners. Abstraction and generalisation to other courses and/or interactive Web applications or services, become feasible, easy and reusable because all middleware technologies are open source.