Authoring
The CAPE authoring environment supports an enactable design representation for on-line learning designs involving static, interactive, and dynamic content elements created with conventional web authoring tools and within CAPE itself. The designs specify when, or under what circumstances, content elements are presented to a learner during the course of a learning experience. Interactive elements can elicit information from a learner, and the outcomes are available immediately to adaptations incorporated into designs. A data modeling facility enables capturing facts, including data defined abstractly by expression, for use in realizing adaptation schemes. Simple sequencing constructs can be extended with computational components for more advanced reasoning.
CAPE designs involve other kinds of specifications in addition to sequencing models. These include the statement of learning objectives and their association with content knowledge represented by curricular taxonomies, as well as tagging with community-specific and standards-based metadata. Such specifications play no direct role in design enactment, but are used to communicate the original designer's intentions to other authors and to provide additional descriptions of elements and resources for use by other tools.
The design representation used by CAPE is a domain-specific visual language, where hierarchically organized icons and connections represent concepts and relationships in the language, respectively, and attributes uniquely characterize occurences. The choice of a visual language for CAPE reflects our interest in a representation that is both expressive and easily constructed. The interface style for such languages, consisting predominantly of drag, drop, interconnect, and specify operations, offers many affordances over textual representations. As a desktop application, CAPE lacks the convenience of web-based authoring tools, but enjoys distinct advantages over forms-based authoring, especially in terms of scalability.
Principal features of the CAPE design representation are presented in the concept map below.
CAPE supports both elaborative (top-down) and integrative (bottom-up) approaches to design. Rapid prototyping of adaptation schemes can be performed prior to content development. Existing content and design elements can be readily incorporated into new designs. The environment supports design-time adaptation by providing abstraction facilities that can be used to capture invariants among families of designs and elements as instructional design patterns. While CAPE—as a general-purpose design tool—is pedagogically neutral, these design abstractions can be used to scaffold particular learning strategies that can then be shared with other authors through an integrated web-based design repository.
CAPE provides a set of extension components that assist the author in creating, previewing, and packaging designs. An event-based agent continuously monitors the author's actions looking for opportunities to provide time-saving assistance. An online learning component makes CAPE-authored tutorials directly available within the design environment to support just-in-time learning. The environment can be extended with wizards that automate complex or repetitive actions. A design previewing component is complemented with a web-based debugger. Content and computational elements can be interchanged with traditional development tools. Completed designs can be directly uploaded to the delivery platform for subsequent assignment to learners.
These and other capabilities of the CAPE design environment are summarized in the concept map below.
CAPE is built on open source technologies from ISIS—particularly, the Generic Modeling Environment (GME) and Meta-GME—and uses the open source Python dynamic programming language for realizing its extension components and for computational aspects of CAPE designs.