A model and architecture for composing digital learning resources: The Teaching Box Project

Web-based digital resources have become an essential tool in classroom instruction and pedagogy. While there are a multitude of these resources available, many of them are difficult to use because they lack contextual relevance connecting curriculum and pedagogical objectives. Many technologies have been developed to address the problems around composing resources, but few of these tools adequately addressed both the models required to specify and connect these resources and software architectures to bring more relevance to the contexts required to make these resources more useful. This thesis is based on observations and data collected from teacher workshops designed to build instructional components called "Teaching Boxes". The creation and manipulation of these Teaching Boxes were observed and representative tasks formed. From these tasks a model and architecture were developed, yielding the development of the Teaching Box application instance. The architecture and model were analyzed and evaluated against these representative tasks, revealing the importance of both model and architecture in bringing greater contextual relevance to digital resources for education.