A Family of Software Product Lines in Educational Technologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-level software product line approach to efficiently develop diverse educational technologies, demonstrated through eLearning systems for Indian languages, achieving substantial cost savings.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-level product line framework for modeling and generating diverse educational systems and instructional designs, tailored for large-scale, multilingual contexts.

Findings

Generated eLearning systems for Hindi and Telugu languages.

Achieved 29 person months of cost savings.

Demonstrated scalability for diverse instructional designs.

Abstract

Rapid advances in education domain demand the design and customization of educational technologies for a large scale and variety of evolving requirements. Here, scale is the number of systems to be developed and variety stems from a diversified range of instructional designs such as varied goals, processes, content, teacher styles, learner styles and, also for eLearning Systems for 22 Indian Languages and variants. In this paper, we present a family of software product lines as an approach to address this challenge of modeling a family of instructional designs as well as a family of eLearning Systems and demonstrate it for the case of adult literacy in India (287 million learners). We present a multi-level product line that connects product lines at multiple levels of granularity in education domain. We then detail two concrete product lines (http://rice.iiit.ac.in), one that generates instructional design editors and two, which generates a family of eLearning Systems based on flexible instructional designs. Finally, we demonstrate our approach by generating eLearning Systems for Hindi and Telugu languages (both web and android versions), which led to significant cost savings of 29 person months for 9 eLearning Systems.