Exploiting Author-Designed Domain-Specific Descriptive Markup Languages in the Production of Learning Content

In this paper we describe an approach to the production of learning resources where authors (students and instructors) are actively involved in the production process. This active involvement is achieved by using descriptive markup technologies. Authors are compelled to produce learning resources in the form of documents, and to make the structure of these documents explicit by creating and using descriptive markup languages. This lets developers formalize these author-designed markup languages and provide suitable transformation specifications for translating these marked documents into their final presentations. We exemplify this approach with the production of DHTML pages by Ph.D. students in archaeology, oriented to be used as resources owned by reusable learning objects in Chasqui, an authoring and deployment tool used in the virtualization of academic museums at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain).