F. M. DA SILVA ET AL.
nologies, with students and teachers by developing educational
activities in places or different times”.
Based on this definition, we can present the iDTV as a means
of support for distance learning, and with the SBTVD expan-
sion and the interactivity provided by the Ginga middleware,
good opportunities show up to the development of educational
applications being an innovator in iDTV and characterizing the
modality of teaching-learning named as t-Learning.
The e-Learning and t-Learning have different scopes taking
into account that e-Learning is highly suitable for a formal
education environment. That is, it is supported by methodolo-
gies quite defined to carry out an outline and summary of topics
to be covered in an education or training course. t-Learning, in
turn, is more appropriate for an informal approach, which al-
lows the learning through the entertainment (Pazos-Arias et al.,
2008).
As it is shown in Figure 1, the interactivity features repre-
sent a great advantage over the traditional television programs,
in view of the fact that it makes the learning experience more
enjoyable. The interactivity allows among other things, the user
should influence the presentation of contents and assesses his
knowledge by on-line tests.
Learning Objects
A relevant concept in relation to the content of teach-
ing-learning in the field of Distance Education is the Learning
Object (LO). According to the Learning Technology Standard
Committee (LTSC) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE), a Learning Object is defined as any entity,
digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education
or training (LTSC, 2002).
According to (Americo, 2010), the LOs are considered in-
formation blocks and present the following features: 1) reus-
ability—Reusable several times in different learning environ-
ments; 2) adaptability—Adaptable to any teaching environment;
3) granularity—pieces of content, in order to facilitate its reus-
ability; 4) accessibility—easily accessible on the Internet to be
used in many locations; 5) durability—possibility to be used
continuously, regardless technology change; 6) interoperabil-
ity—ability to operate through a hardware variety, operating
systems and browsers, i.e. effective exchange between different
systems.
The efforts for development of standards aiming to the de-
scription of LOs may be exemplified by the work of important
organizations such as IEEE and the Global Learning Consor-
tium, which have proposed the Learning Object Metadata
(LOM) standard (LOM, 2002). The metadata standard LOM
Figure 1.
t-Learning: between pure entertainment and formal education. Source:
(Pazos-Arias et al. , 2008).
allows the LOs be classified, reused and found by searching
tools in an appropriate manner. The main elements of LOM are
described below:
General: Gather information in general, which describe the
LO as a whole;
Life Cycle: Gather features concerning to the history and
Status Quo of the LO;
Meta-Metadata: Collect information about the metadata
instances;
Technical: Gather the features and the technical require-
ments of LO;
Educational: Collect the pedagogical and educational char-
acteristics of LO;
Rights: Describe Copyright And Other Restrictions;
Relation: Define the relation characteristics among the
LOs;
Annotation: Comments regarding to educational use and
information of LO;
Classification: Describe the LO in relation to a classifica-
tion of a specific system.
The Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM),
which has been developed by Advanced Distributed Learning
(ADL), is also widely used and describes how the content could
be modeled and how the learning management environments
should handle such content to make its reuse viable (ADL,
2010).
The standard SCORM content can be distributed to the stu-
dents by any Learning Management System (LMS), which has
to be compatible with SCORM and use the same version of
standard (ADL, 2010). Essentially the context description
model of SCORM defines a set of metatags and statements to
be used in the description files or in the content, aiming for the
transfer information to the LMS about the content and the in-
teraction of students with the content.
The Figure 2 shows the SCORM organization as a collection
of standards and specifications of other organizations contained
or referenced in the model.
To enable the content aggregation in a format that is easily
interpretable and transferable among systems on the Internet,
the ADL has adopted the definition of a special file named
(imsmanifest.xml), encoded in xml, which describes the differ-
ent components and resources. It has markers for all the fea-
tures of the SCORM provided in the configuration files, as well
as the locations of the referenced files by these components.
The Figure 3 shows a pseudocode example of imsmani-
fest.xml.
As it is shown in Figure 3, the imsmanife st.xml star ts by de-
fining the language and version of the file. Then it presents the
main element <manifest> in which are described the domains
that support the entire coding.
The imsmanifest.xml structure is composed by the following
elements.
<metadata>: Used in any component of the data model and
the content package6;
<organizations>: Mandatory in case of Content Aggregation
Package7;
<item>: Corresponds to an activity of content model;
<resources>: Contains a set of references to the different re-
sources;
6Concerning to SCORM Content Package, see Figure 2.
7Concerning to Content Aggregation Model (CAM), defines the method o
packing, labeling, research a nd content exchange.
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