2. Issue December 2005

Summary

Issue 2 presents two articles on teaching software engineering (SE): the MuSoft portal offering 250 free learning objects for SE, and the description of the didactical setup, content creation, and experiences in an e-learning course on SE. Two more articles present a reference model on learning content systems with a multi-channel strategy and a report on the chances and perspectives of various European e-learning projects for SMEs.

Zusammenfassung

Ausgabe 2 präsentiert zwei Beiträge aus dem Bereich des e-Learnings im Software Engineering (SE): (1) das MuSoft Portal mit 250 freien SE-Lernobjekten und (2) die Beschreibung des didaktischen Designs, der Inhaltserzeugung und der Erfahrungen in einem e-Learning-Kurs zu SE. In zwei weiteren Beiträgen wird ein Referenzmodell für Learning Content-Systeme mit einer multi-Kanal Strategie vorgestellt und über Chancen und Perspektiven europäischer e-Learning-Projekte für KMUs berichtet.

Editorial

We are happy to present the second issue of the "e-learning and education" journal. Producing an electronic open access journal is a very interesting and challenging task--we are in the middle of the ongoing discussion on open access. There are two important reasons: First, open access articles have significantly higher citation impact than non-open access articles. Second, open access is a way out of the libraries' journal budget crisis. Many people are talking about the "golden road" and the "green road" of open access. The green road is basically self-archiving of traditional publications by the authors. The majority of journals allow self-archiving and many authors already "archive" their articles either on their web page or in a dedicated repository. However, the potential readers still have to find these articles.

We are on the "golden road" by actively promoting an open access journal. Our journal is free for all and the long term accessibility is ensured; no articles will "vanish" because an author moves or removes his web pages.

More interesting are the challenges and possibilities of electronic publication. Weber-Wulff and Schmiedecke's article "Learning Software Engineering via Internet" has (embedded) additional material: a flash animation, a chat recording, and a movie. This makes the article an interesting experience and would have not been possible within a traditional, paper-based article. Similarly, "eLearning--a chance for small and medium sized enterprises" by Hamburg, Lindecke, and Terstriep also contains a flash animation. We hope that future articles will also use such possibilities for the benefit of the reader.

As you might have noticed, we have changed the mode of publication: There are still issues that are published regularly. However, the final versions of accepted research papers are now published as "previews" to achieve a timely publication. They are already citeable and their URL and URN stay the same when they appear in the next issue of eleed.

We have some exciting future plans for eleed and one of the next things will be the possibility to download articles in pdf format.

Again, this issue consists of three parts: reviewed e-learning articles, non-reviewed project reports, and e-learning book descriptions. In the first part, there are four interesting articles. Two of the articles complement each other--they both focus on teaching software engineering via e-learning.

In "Software Engineering and eLearning: The MuSoft Project" Doberkat et al present their experiences with e-learning specifically dedicated at teaching software engineering. Like any other engineering discipline, software engineering is not very well suited for teaching in a classical way. Doberkat et al present the project MuSoft, which enhances software engineering courses with videos, animations, and dedicated tools. The project's results include a portal which offers more than 250 different free learning objects in the field of software engineering.

While Doberkat et al focused on the learning objects, Weber-Wulff and Schmiedecke report about the experiences with a complete e-learning course for software engineering in "Learning Software Engineering via Internet". Besides discussion about content creation and didactical setup, they focus on experiences with online teamwork and communication training.

The article "Multi-Channel-Learning" from vom Brocke (which is only available in German) focuses on learning content systems with in a multi channel strategy. Such a strategy is necessary to adapt to the varying learner's context and preferences. Vom Brocke presents a reference model which has been implemented in two e-learning platforms (Freestyle Learning and OpenUSS) and reports on experiences.

The fourth paper, "eLearning--a chance for small and medium sized enterprises" by Hamburg, Lindecke, and Terstriep, reports on the chances and perspectives of the various European e-learning projects for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It contains three examples of such European projects and reports on the state of the art in the European countries.

Besides the four scientific articles, this issue includes four non-reviewed project reports about e-learning in public administration, an authoring tool for XML content management, courseware for Bayesian decision making, and e-learning for the handicapped.

Also, we have included four reviews of interesting German books in the area of e-learning.

We hope that issue is at least as interesting as the first. Have fun reading it!

Jens Krinke
Co-Editor-in-Chief, eleed