CAPE is a visual language for designing adaptive courseware delivered to learners through the web. What's a visual language? It's a language that uses elements represented by distinctive icons and connections formed between these elements to describe, in the case of CAPE, what content is delivered to the learner, when it is delivered, data used as part of decision-making, and many other specifications for how a learning experience unfolds. The language also supports the statement of learning objectives and the association of these objectives with elements of content knowledge represented as taxonomies of domain concepts. These specifications are a kind of metadata, or descriptive data, used to help other authors understand the original designer's intent. Other kinds of metadata are supported that describe the elements of the courseware, such as the file-based resources it requires, to the content management system of a delivery platform.
Why use a visual language? Because such languages tend to make structure and relationships more readily apparent, thereby making it easier to share designs among authors. The "drag and drop" interface style promotes a form of specification that is easier to construct for designers in domains that are not accustomed to detailed textual representations.
A web-based courseware is like a set of web pages that constitute a web site. What is distinctive about a web-based courseware is order of presentation. A web site is a hypermedia; that is, it is a set of pages with links used to navigate among the pages. A web-based courseware typically presents content in some order established by the author that reflects a logical progression in the presentation of materials, with the ability to interject opportunities for reflection by the learner. An adaptive web-based courseware may use what is known about an individual learner, a priori or inferred from their responses to questions, to alter the presentation of learning materials. For example, it may be possible to infer that a learner has a particular misconception and to immediately remediate this situation before continuing the presentation of materials. A problem-solvng task may benefit from a process of diagnoses of difficulties, breaking larger problems into constituent sub-problems, and then returning to the larger problem—all scaffolded by learning resources made "ready-to-hand" to the learner within the learning environment.
While web-based courseware may provide a different usage experience from an ordinary web site, there is clearly a shared set of concerns regarding the constituent pages themselves. In CAPE, each content element is a page of browser-deliverable materials typically authored in HTML. Such pages can contain images and other multimedia resources, authored with conventional content authoring tools and "assembled" using HTML just like other web pages. CAPE designers use models to capture the dependency of the design on file-based resources from the author's local file system, in the Repository, or otherwise available in cyberspace. CAPE further provides the capability for dynamic resources—resources that contain placeholders that are satisfied at delivery time. This capability can be used to modify small content elements on a page or to generate entire pages of content based on data defined or computed by the design, or else anything known or learned about a student during the enactment of the design. Dynamic content is clearly a capability that makes CAPE designs truly adaptive.
Interactivity is an essential aspect of adaptive learning experiences. CAPE provides an integrated facility for authoring formative assessments for use in its designs. While these interactive content elements are based on HTML forms, CAPE makes authoring them easier and makes the same adaptive content capabilities that it provides to other content elements available to its assessments. Further, issues such as the validation of responses can be handled automatically by CAPE. Validation is a particularly important concern when some reasoning is performed on the responses as part of an adaptive presentation scheme. CAPE also supports other kinds of interactive content that can interchange data with, and communicate outcomes to, the learning platform via web services as part of the interaction.
CAPE, as an authoring language, is pedagogically neutral. It merely enables some basic, yet powerful, set of possibilities for learning designs. How these capabilities are used is entirely left to the designer. CAPE provides the ability to represent design patterns, which are essentially templated designs that capture invariants among a family of related designs. It is expected that these capabilities will be used by authors to represent desirable pedagogical strategies and to make these available to other authors in the form of patterns and examplars in CAPE's integrated design repository. A small, and growing, number of these resources are already available in the Repository.
The remainder of this documentation resource, which is itself authored with CAPE, provides articles that describe various aspects of creating CAPE designs. Many of these articles are associated directly with design elements in CAPE, and can be accessed for quick reference with the Help menu item from the context menu when the element is selected in the model editor. Also, this documentation is accessible from inside CAPE at any time using the Online Learning CAPE component to support "just-in-time" learning.
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