Course construction - automatically generated structure

[jan]

Users can drag standalone compontents like textareas, chat, discussion groups etc.. into the course builder and hit the submit button to automatically generate the structure of the course. Then the user can go through the course and fill in the content.

[tarmo]

Text area and chat are in two different levels of abstraction... Should these "components" actually be "pedagogical templates"? Please elaborate.

[jan]

Textareas and chat are in this case not two different levels of abstraction, but two different components that can be used in a template. Of course they are different in the sense that the first is clearly a component and the second is a service, but from a structural point of view they can be seen as components that can be dragged into a "whiteboard" to create the activity flow in a course or learning object. This activity flow has a structure and if this structure reflects a pedagogical model or process you have a template. This feature is somewhat like these found in LAMS where they have activity compontents like chat, forums etc.. However it might be interesting to have standard compontents like textareas and such that would be converted to html-files or something like that..