Increasing reuse in learning objects authoring: a case study with the Cacuria tool

Artifacts and best practices reuse as a way of improving educational resources and easing and speeding up the authoring process have been an important theme since the earliest research efforts on Learning Objects (LOs). In such a context, authoring tools that allow teachers and tutors to create educational content without the need for advanced programming knowledge play an essential role. This paper presents the evolution of Cacuria -an authoring tool that supports the creation of interactive multimedia educational content for the Web and digital TV- towards improved support for LOs reuse and analyzes the impact of the proposals as perceived by the users of the tool. The proposed evolution is based on previous work on reuse requirements and best practices on authoring LOs, which resulted in the inclusion of three new features on the tool: Layouts, Widgets, and Application Templates. Through these new resources, authors can build LOs by reusing resources created by other authors and reuse good practices, e.g., through previously validated pedagogical practices. The added functionalities were evaluated in a qualitative study with 11 teachers/tutors. The results of the study indicate that the participants believe that the new functionalities improved the creation of reusable LOs both in the creative aspect and in the reduction of the total development time.