A Technological Approach to Creating and Maintaining Media-specific Educational Materials for Multiple Teaching Contexts

Depending on the teaching context different types of educational materials are used. To best support the various forms of communication, the educational content should be provided in a suitable media form. For example: visual PowerPoint slides for face-to-face teaching; detailed lecture notes for follow up at home and self-study online content for e-learning. Each media type has particular characteristics, which lead to a range of individual ways of creating content using media-specific authoring tools. The effort required to offer concurrent educational materials for different teaching contexts increases with every additional medium. The author has to create and maintain every single document, although there is an overlap in content and structure between all the materials.This paper discusses the requirements for authoring and maintaining those documents and how they are received and analyzes the lack of current authoring technology. Based on this pre-study, a technological approach is demonstrated, which combines media-specific formats and authoring tools with a connected single-source content system.