AUTHORING TOOLS FOR COMPONENT-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

We argue that a focus on building an authoring tool for a complete lea rning environment is misplaced. An analysis of the task of authoring a commercial educational system reveals it to be best accomplished thro ugh authoring separate components. For many of these components, autho ring tools already exist and need not be duplicated for use in educati onal systems. Connecting the various components together is a separate authoring task, and parts of this task are different for educational systems than for typical component-based software. The second half of this article describes the Visual Translator, an authoring tool we hav e written specifically for this purpose.