A conceptual model for the shareability of e-Courses in China

By investigation and analysis, we found that there existed a series of problems leading to poor shareability of e-courses in “High Quality e-Courses Constructing Project” launched by Chinese Ministry of Education since 2003. However, the lack of unified constructing standards, which mainly refer to design standards and technical specifications, is the key issue. In response to the issue, we demonstrate our approaches to improve the shareability of the e-courses in the follow-up project. A conceptual model from top-level design is proposed, which has four sharable components—Media Materials, Knowledge Atom, Learning Unit and Course/Modules. In practice, under this model, unified information architecture of an e-course, critical metadata and some pedagogical design patterns are proposed to the course constructors (organizers, designers, instructors and technical developers).