Qualipso Brasil

Educational modules consist of concise units of study delivered to students by using technologies and computational resources [Barbosa and Maldonado 2006a]. The development of educational modules should consider intrinsic characteristics of knowledge as well as the way its content is structured and organized. Besides that, educational modules themselves should be evolvable, reusable and adaptable to different learning scenarios and objectives.
Among the activities related to the development of educational modules, content modeling is a fundamental one. Despite its relevance, there are few initiatives to address the problem of modeling educational modules content. In general, these initiatives aim at providing ways to establish effective educational products, capable to improve and/or create motivating learning situations, but none of them provides a complete set of features addressing the conceptual, instructional and didactic perspectives. Moreover, they do not consider a process for developing educational modules.
In this tutorial we focus on the content modeling activity and discuss the establishment of an integrated modeling approach for developing educational content – IMA-CID: Integrated Modeling Approach - Conceptual, Instructional and Didactic [Barbosa and Maldonado 2006a]. We present the main characteristics of IMA-CID and illustrate its practical application by the development of an educational module for the software testing knowledge domain. More specifically, the module was developed for a particular subject of the testing techniques topic – the mutant analysis testing criterion [DeMillo et al. 1978].