GALE extensibility evaluation : a qualitative approach

To stimulate the uptake of adaptive elearning applications the modular and highly extensible GALE system was built. This paper presents and discusses in details the results obtained by a qualitative evaluation of the extensibility and modularity of GALE. We analyze the quality of the applications and extensions developed by master students in computer science during a six-week project. We also analyze the answers and the comments of 16 master students of the same group, where the students answered about their experience in authoring and developing in GALE. In our experiments the quality of the applications and extensions obtained was high. There were some initial difficulties, mainly with the installation of the software and development framework, and caused by the lack of thorough documentation. Despite that bootstrap problem the students were able to create adaptive course texts and extensions to GALE within a six week project.