Representations of instructional purpose in courseware requirements engineering

Abstract

This paper reports work in progress in the field of courseware requirements engineering. Capture of the educational requirements for a new piece of courseware is a complex, time consuming, error prone activity and yet it is key to the success or failure of the courseware development project. If the requirements have been misunderstood, however technically excellent the courseware, it will not meet its purposes. Because the elicitation and specification of requirements is so complex and vital, researchers have been working on new methods and tools which can help reduce the complexity and error rate. Such research and development work goes under the heading ‘courseware requirements engineering’. The present study is part of a programme of work intended to develop tools which can help relatively inexperienced courseware designers (a) capture courseware requirements (b) relate these to units of learning material (ULMs) in the courseware while it is under development: maintaining an up to date record of linkages between requirements and ULMs — the so-called ‘requirements tracing’ process — and (c) use instructional design constructs which have a firm basis in contemporary research on learning. We envisage a workbench of inter-operable computer-based tools which can assist in courseware requirements engineering. The study reported here — at the risk of confusing the reader — is part of a requirements elicitation process for tools for courseware requirements engineering. We present some data from two experimental studies which illustrate issues arising in a user-centered approach to requirements elicitation, where the tasks carried out by the users involve representations of instructional purpose.