SCORM-COMPLIANT LEARNING SYSTEM

WITH ANNOTATION CAPABILITY - POWER RTE

Dowming Yeh, Han-Yung Yang, Wen-Shen Liu

Graduate Institute of Information and Computer Education , National Kaohsiung Normal Universit,

116 Hou-Ping 1

Road, Kaohsiung, 802, Taiwan

Keywords: e-Learning, Annotation, SCORM, Software Reengineering.

Abstract: SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard simply records learner’s evaluation grade

and traces their learning path. However, learning portfolios contain not only learner’s evaluation grade and

the browsing sequence of their learning contents, but also annotations which the learner add onto learning

objects, for example: comments, highlighting marks, digests, and so on. Therefore, a popular open source

SCORM-compliant browser－ADL Sample RTE only records grades for pre-test/post-test and learning path,

lacking the capability of storing annotation information. This research applies software reengineering

techniques to enhance ADL Sample RTE so that learner can store annotation information with the enhanced

version. The software Reengineering process is divided into three phases. Static analysis is performed first

to dissect the system architecture, followed by dynamic analysis, which is proceeded interactively through

web fronts to understand how various dynamic pages startup. Finally, annotation functionality is added in

system reconstruction phase. The outcome of the reengineering process is called Power RTE. Besides its

annotation power, Power RTE also enables sharing annotations among its users; therefore, learning objects

with annotation information could be reused on this e-Learning platform.

1 INTRODUCTION

As e-Learning technology matures and its

application flourishes, more and more digital

educational materials are produced. However,

courseware is not the only factor for successful

e-Learning implementation. Learning systems also

play an important role in leading to the success of

e-learning. In the past, the contents of teaching

materials were authored by teachers to cover the

need of all learners. But once the content is on line,

it is fixed and seldom changed. The different needs

of individual learners cannot be addressed. Although

there are adaptive learning systems under research

and development, learners are still constrained by the

material presented by the learning system.

A truly successful e-learning system should be

centered on learners and empower learners with

various sorts of learning tools to construct his own

knowledge. Tools useful in traditional learning such

as ink annotations could also be useful in the

e-learning setting. Ink annotations serve as the most

convenient medium to make ideas clearer in

documents, in such forms as sketches or handwritten

text notes (Fogli et al., 2004, Yang et al.,2004). In

learning systems without the capability recording

users’ annotation, a learner can only read the

learning objects in the system, and he cannot mark

his ideas or obtain ideas marked by him or others in

the past (Chong and Sakauchi, 2001). The learning

effect would be lower than systems that support

learners with annotation capability.

In November 1997, the Department of Defense

and the White House Office of Science and

Technology Policy launched the Advanced

Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative. The missions

of the initiative are to solve the problem of the

communication between each e-learning system and

learning objects sharing. Among these things,

SCORM specification describes a run-time

environment (RTE) for executing reusable learning

objects. RTE contains three parts: launch mechanism,

application program interface (API), and data model.

Learners (client) launch the learning objects (LOs)

with mechanism. API manages the pass of learners’

information. Data model defines how to access data

such as learners’ portfolio (Mor and Minguillón,

2004).

383

Yeh D., Yang H. and Liu W. (2006).

SCORM-COMPLIANT LEARNING SYSTEM WITH ANNOTATION CAPABILITY - POWER RTE.

In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and

e-Government / e-Learning, pages 383-386

DOI: 10.5220/0001243003830386

 SciTePress

RTE does not address issues on annotation;

therefore, all its implementations do not possess any

annotation functionality. In this work, an

open-source RTE implementation, ADL Sample RTE

1.3 beta 3, is reengineered to produce a new learning

system with annotation capability, named Power

RTE.

Our software reengineering techniques and the

original system, ADL Sample RTE are discussed in

section 2. The reengineered system are presented in

section 3. The related work is discussed in section 4.

Finally, conclusions are given.

2 RTE REVERSE ENGINEERING

After evaluating the complexity, interactivity, and

functionality of the ADL Sample RTE, we adopted a

reengineering process to construct Power RTE. The

two major steps of reverse engineering process are as

follows:

(a) Static analysis: During this phase, the

system is analyzed using some tools to discover

its structure such as module relationships.

(b) Dynamic analysis: In this step, two slices

would be executed. One is to examine the

runtime behavior of the system such as the

interaction between server and client. The other

is to find out what source code is triggered to

execute.

The Reconstruction phase is the most complex

one of the four phases. The main tasks of this phase

are to design, develop, and deploy the evolved

system. At last, a new system will be produced in

this step. After reconstruction, the reengineered

system is evaluated to determine whether it

conforms to requirement or not.

Good tools are prerequisite to the successful

execution of a reengineering work. Tools used in this

study are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Borland

J++ Builder (BJB). Dreamweaver is useful in static

analysis and reconstructing application interface in

the last phase. BJB supplies code structure window

that is very powerful in tracing source code. BJB is

mainly applied for dynamic analysis and modifying

the program code.

Any SCORM materials contain a XML file,

named ‘imsmanifest.xml’. It describes the general

information of the material such as the internal

structure, course names, and so on. In the process of

course browsing, RTE system would parse this file

to present the course structure and all course units.

2.1 Static Analysis

In the static analysis phase, we used Dreamweaver to

discover the structure of ADL RTE. Dreamweaver

supplies site-map capability that searches and lists

all files related to the home page of a web site. In our

case, we set LMSMenu.jsp as the home page, and

Dreamweaver provides the site map based on

LMSMenu.jsp as shown in Figure 1. The root of the

tree structure is LMSMenu.jsp and the leaves are the

related jsp files, java files, and so on.

Since the focus is on annotation capability and

annotations are closely related to browsing functions,

we searched for course browsing. And it is easy to

identify the files with the function “View Registered

Courses”, viewCourses.jsp and

sequencingEngine.jsp, from the site map.

2.2 Dynamic Analysis

The files identified from the previous phase are

analyzed further to understand their behaviors. We

adopted event-trigger method to analyze source code

with BJB. During the phase, a series of code tracing

is made. We start with LMSMenu.jsp by clicking the

“View Registered Course” button in LMSMenu.jsp

in BJB. BJB returned the viewCourses.jsp

automatically.

Module viewCourses.jsp displays a list of

courses that a learner registers for. We just have to

analyze what will happen when one of the course

names is chosen. And we find that the selected

course name is transferred to the module

sequencingEngine.jsp. File sequencingEngine.jsp

determines which item should be launched in the

current course. It responds to the events such as

Next-Launch or Previous-Launch.

We also discovered the code for gathering the

path of single learning object by locating the code

session.setAttribute("pagePath", nextPath) in

sequencingEngine.jsp. File LMSFrame.jsp contains

the API Adapter applet and the buttons of the

Run-time Environment such as login, next, previous,

suspend, and quit.

WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING

384

Figure 1: Site Map.

By discovering the presentation code of the

buttons and the path code of the single course

content in this phase, we are ready to build a new

button for annotation function, and the content can

be transferred to a new annotation web page by the

path of a learning object.

3 REENGINEERING POWER RTE

After reverse engineering ADL Sample RTE to

determine the modules that are to be modified, the

next step is to introduce the annotation functionality

to the original RTE code. The presentation of course

content in RTE is still in HTML format, and since

most annotation functionalities such as highlighting

and underlining are in fact realized by general

HTML editors. Again, an open source HTML editor

solution is sought and a tool called HtmlArea is

chosen to be integrated into RTE to realize the

annotation functionality. HtmlArea is implemented

in Java Scripts and can be loaded into any browsers

easily.

As indicated by the result of dynamic analysis,

the command buttons available in browsing course

content are defined in LMSFrame.jsp. Therfore, a

button for invoking annotation functionality is added

in LMSFrame.jsp and the proceduce invoked is

defined in a file, anno.jsp.

The procedure in anno.jsp finds the source file of

the course content, load the file into annoContent

area, and invoke the HtmlArea to provide the

annotation functionality. From the previous analysis,

the path of the course content is set by the module

sequencingEngine.jsp, and we can access the name

of the path through the method of the session object:

object path = session.getAttribute("pagePath")

Once the name of the path is accessed, the

content of the course can be loaded with the

following function:

response.sendRedirect(“http://localhost:8080”+path)

The functionalities of HtmlArea are customized

and removed of features not related to annotation.

The remaining functions are

z Font setting, including setting a particular font,

size,

z Type setting such as bold, italic, and underline

z Color setting for foreground and background

color of text for highlight

z Commentary insertion: The image insertion

function in HtmlArea is modified so that a user can

insert commentary with text or image and the

content where a commentary applies would be

marked with an icon. When the user browses the

content afterwards, he can review the commentary

by moving the mouse over the icon. Finally, the

annotation information added by the user is stored by

the Save button.

The stored annotation information can be shared

with others with the same mechanism for content

sharing since all the annotation information are in

fact embedded in the HTML files contain the course

content. Therefore, an export function is provided in

LMSMenu.jsp to package the annotated content back

to a SCORM format for sharing with other learners

with readers that support SCORM 1.3 beta 3.

4 RELATED WORK

Many annotation systems are based on XML. One of

SCORM-COMPLIANT LEARNING SYSTEM WITH ANNOTATION CAPABILITY - POWER RTE

385

them is HATS (Hypertext Annotation and Trail

System) (Kim et al., 2004). HATS is based on

WebDAV, which is a XML-based protocol to support

collaborative authoring and manage namespace.

HATS is implemented as a plug-in facility onto the

Mozilla browser. When a user invokes the annotation

functionality, a menu frame containing an input area

and previous annotation information would be

displayed. All the annotation information is inputted

through this menu frame; hence, the original page

content stays intact. HATS can also provide

annotation to PDF files and even multimedia files

with pictures.

Ramachandran et al. develop a system for

pen-based annotation information (Ramachandran

and Kashi, 2003). Its user applies pen-based input

devices to annotate web pages. The annotation is

stored in XML format to record various attributes

such as ink point, text area, and so on. Since

SCORM is also based on XML, the extension of

these works to annotate SCORM learning objects

may be plausible, but integrating the XML structures

require certain amount of work.

Besides XML standard, some researches follow

industrial standard such as RDF. Annotea is a

web-based annotation sharing infrastructure

following open RDF standard (Kahan and M.-R.

Koivunen., 2001). Annotea treats annotation as

additional information of the original documents,

and stores annotations on several annotation servers.

Annotea achieves annotation sharing and reuse

through open RDF. When a user wants to annotate

some texts in the document, he simply marks these

texts and presses the associated key, and the

annotation information is then stored in RDF format.

5 CONCLUSION

This research aims to develop a learning content

presentation system, Power RTE, which support

annotation functionality and comply with SCORM

standard. On such a platform, learners could

annotate their learning materials by making their

notes, highlighting key point, and so on to improve

comprehending and reviewing these digital materials

as well as personalizing their learning processes.

Power RTE is based on ADL RTE 1.3 Beta 3.

Through software reengineering techniques, ADL

RTE 1.3 Beta 3 is analyzed statically and

dynamically so that modules for annotation functions

may be introduced and integrated. The annotation

functionality, including font setting, type setting,

highlighting, and commentary insertion, is derived

from another open source solution, HtmlArea. The

annotation produced by a user can be packaged into

a SCORM object and shared to other learners.

The future development of Power RTE is to

support more diverse types of annotation, say,

allowing voice or even video annotation. The

opinions of users on Power RTE should also be

collected to adapt and enhance its functionality.

Finally, the effectiveness of Power RTE in

promoting learning effect needs to be studied

carefully to prove whether such tool meets the goal

of its development.

REFERENCES

Chong, N. S. and Sakauchi, M., 2001 “Creating and

sharing Web notes via a standard browser.” SIGCUE

Outlook 27, 3, pp. 4-15.

Fogli, D., Fresta, G., and Mussio, P. 2004. “On electronic

annotation and its implementation.” In Proceedings of

the Working Conference on Advanced Visual

interfaces, ACM Press, New York, NY, pp. 98-102.

Kahan and M.-R. Koivunen., 2001 Annotea: an open rdf

infrastructure for shared web annotations. In The tenth

international World Wide Web Conference on World

Wide Web, Hong Kong.

Kim, S., Slater, M., and Whitehead, E. J., 2004.

WebDAV-based hypertext annotation and trail system.

In Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM Conference on

Hypertext and Hypermedia (Santa Cruz, CA, USA,

August 09 - 13, 2004). ACM Press, New York, NY,

87-88.

Mor, E. and Minguillón, J., 2004. E-learning

personalization based on itineraries and long-term

navigational behavior. In Proceedings of the 13th

international World Wide Web Conference on

Alternate Track Papers &Amp; Posters (New York, NY,

USA, May 19 - 21, 2004), ACM Press, New York, NY,

264-265.

Ramachandran, S., Kashi, R., 2003 "An Architecture for

Ink Annotations on Web Documents," icdar, p. 256,

Seventh International Conference on Document

Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'03) - Volume 1.

Yang, S. J., Du, V. M., Shao, N. W., and Chen, I., 2004.

Applying Personalized Annotation Mechanism to

E-Documentation. In Proceedings of the E-Commerce

Technology For Dynamic E-Business, IEEE

international Conference on (Cec-East'04) - Volume 00

(September 13 - 15, 2004). IEEE Computer Society,

Washington, DC, 142-145.

WEBIST 2006 - E-LEARNING

386