Building Reusable and Adaptable Web-Based Courses

The high costs of production and maintenance of high quality webbased instructional material require to optimize its use, by means of methods and tools that allow, on one hand, to dynamically obtain a variety of courses starting from a set of contents and pedagogical objectives, and, on the other, to build personalised educational paths starting from a course and learner's needs. On this basis, we present an approach to the design and development of educational content aimed at tackling, in a uniform context, both problems of reusability and adaptability of web-based instructional material. The feasibility of our idea has been analysed via an XML-based application oriented to the training of adults (mathematics teachers and University students) on Game Theory. This application is an operative example of the power of XML technology for building educational web systems which satisfy both the author's need of reusing material and the learner's need to avail him/herself of effective educational resources