Authoring Tools for Component-Based Learning Environments

We argue that a focus on building an authoring tool for a complete learning environment is misplaced. An analysis of the task of authoring a commercial educational system reveals it to be best accomplished through authoring separate components. For many of these components, authoring tools already exist and need not be duplicated for use in educational systems. Connecting the various components together is a separate authoring task, and parts of this task are different for educational systems than for typical component-based software. The second half of this article describes the Visual Translator, an authoring tool we have written specifically for this purpose.