AVUNET Author: An Authoring System for Distance Learning Platform

Abstract

An authoring system was presented in this study, “AVUNET Author” which allows the creation of interactive learning object within a distance teaching platform on the Internet. For the conception of this system, we stated with the assumption that the content of distance teaching is not just to put online the content used for classroom teaching. In addition to the classical functions such as editing and formatting a text, the system is enriched with functions to cater for the needs of the instructor designing the course content. The users can thus generate automatically the table of contents, create questions for evaluation purpose and manage the bibliographical references. The graphical construction of the content allows an easy manipulation and a better course structure for a later adaptation to the learner’s profiles. We started experimenting with the system at the University of Sétif in collaboration with a group of computer science instructors.