LearningMate ICE

A collaborative environment for authoring, managing and packaging content.

A LearningMate Framework Paper

Addressing The Problem

Creating Rapid eLearning Content in a Distributed Environment

Consider these scenarios:

• Content revisions take up a bulk of effort of the content production cycle because, the stake-holders who authored or conceptualised the learning module get to look at the content in its final only at the end of the process — resulting in multiple edit iterations.
• If existing content needs to be created for a different delivery format, the packaging process needs to be repeated.
• Because the content is often not available at a single location, editors from the same organisation might end up duplicating content.

Either of these scenarios or a combination of them causes content development processes to be significantly time-consuming and expensive processes. If the volume of the content is higher, the impact increases proportionately. This further affects time to market and addressing market opportunities.

The Solution

LearningMate ICE provides the power to look at content in its final form to authors at the click of a button. Authors can publish content at the click of a button as well. Content is stored in a central repository and can easily be packaged into multiple formats for delivery. Version are automatically created by LearningMate ICE so that it can easily be reused. Content can be tagged with meta-data, tags and taxonomies so that it can easily be found for reuse. ICE provides a collaborative online environment where editors, authors, reviewers and developers can work collaboratively and create learning content.

LearningMate ICE enables a collaborative environment called project spaces which serves as a common view for users working on a Learning Module. A Project Space allows for structuring of content and allows specific import and export options for the structured content. By default, ICE comes with project spaces to manage test-banks and online courses.

Technical Architecture

ICE is comprised primarily of an online application which is built on MS .NET Framework 2.0. This component provides the online collaborative interface as well as all of the ICE web services. The online application provides Business Logic components that enable (a) Content Authoring, (b) Preview, and (c) Upload

The online application comprises of a repository component built on MarkLogic (TM) which is an XML database. These components provide mechanisms for (a) Content Tagging, (b) Versioning, (c) Search, and (d) Project Spaces.

LearningMate ICE is an authoring and development workflow management system that enables authors to author content for the online product using Microsoft Word as the authoring environment. The core aspect of ICE is a custom toolbar within these Word templates that enable authors to preview their content in the format as it would appear in the final product. ICE also enables encapsulation of the authoring process from the media development process. This ensures that different profiles working as part of a product development process in ICE are able to contribute effectively through the workflow management system that ICE enables. In addition to this, ICE enables a comprehensive content repository that is powered by Marklogic XML database server. Marklogic enables extensive tagging, taxonomy, and powerful search features.

The Project Spaces made available as part of the online application allow for import from and export to specific formats/packages. Authoring features are exposed through MS Word using word macros that interact with webservices exposed by the online application. All content created using ICE is stored in XML. All the binary media content is stored as is in the filesystem. The filesystem could be a SAN (Ideally) storage device.

Flexible and Scalable Architecture

ICE is built on a robust XML database – MarkLogic™. ICE can be configured to scale with organisational needs. The user interface for ICE is built using the latest trends in Web 2.0 and this facilitates an interface that is very simple and involves lesser clicks and page loads.

ICE is built on an extensible framework where every component is XML driven. This means that adding template types, layouts or project types to the system is very easy, furthermore for existing project types, additional export and import options can be configured with minimal customisation. This extends to the asset types supported by ICE as well.

Key Features

Simplified authoring using MS Word

ICE templates are made available through MS Word toolbar. Authoring is as simple as selecting a relevant template and keying in content in the relevant areas.

One click preview and publish

ICE templates allow authors to preview content right from within MS Word as they author content. The preview also presents the authors with a choice of layouts (renditions) to choose from. Once content is authored, a single click publishes content back to the online repository.

Automatic versioning

ICE keeps track of edits and reuse of content by versioning it. Content reused from published projects will never be overwritten.

Central Repository

All content created as part of ICE is stored in a central repository for reuse. Content created as part of a Project is made available for other projects as soon as a project is published.

Content Reuse

ICE allows content to be tagged using basic meta-data and classified using Tags, Taxonomy and Learning Objective. An intuitive user interface allows for accessing content using the classification mechanisms as a filter.

Extensible framework

The ICE framework is easily extensible in terms of authoring templates, import/export options and project types.

Content Packaging

ICE stores all content as XML natively and can easily support multiple content packaging formats. By default IMS packages are supported for both Test Banks and Online Courses.

Download the Paper (PDF)