AN AUTHORING TOOL FOR DEVELOPING HIGHLY

INTERACTIVE DIGITAL BOOKS

The IntBooks Platform

Eug´enio Rocha, Ana Breda, M´ario Soares and Telmo Parreira

Departamento de Matem´atica, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal

Keywords:

Authoring tool, Educational software, Interactive digital books.

Abstract:

We present a document platform, denominated “IntBooks”, that seamlessly aggregates web technologies into

digital books, giving the reader an interactive, intelligent and rich environment, and authors a “simple” and

collaborative way to build and share them. It addresses some of the common technical issues as: how should

different media (e.g. mathematics formulae) be delivered and displayed in a large set of devices; how users

interaction should be made and statistics collected; and how authors may reuse and mesh up content from

different web repositories. A particular IntBook planned for the ﬁfth and sixth grades of Basic Portuguese

School is also discussed, emphasizing its speciﬁcities and additional features.

1 INTRODUCTION

Any multimedia educational software is a structured

and varied blend presentation of multiple media, such

as text, formulae, graphical images, animation, audio

sound and full-motion video, by a computer-mediated

software or a single interactive (web) application.

Multimedia software may use some or all of these

modes of communication, however, it is more than a

collection of multiple media and hyperlinks (Chang,

2000). As a complex interaction of stimuli (McKer-

lie and Preece, 1993), multimedia software for educa-

tion aims to put users in contact with a speciﬁc set of

knowledge, in an organized and reactive way. In fact,

it can be a powerful tool in the hands of the perfor-

mance technologist and multimedia designers to be

used by educators. The effects of multimedia-based

instruction versus lecture-based instruction on teach-

ing has been investigated in several works in the lit-

erature, e.g. in (McKethan et al., 2001). The last

decades have witnessed a steady, irreversible trend to-

ward the globalization of e-learning tools, and educa-

tion through the use of software-intensive web tech-

nology in particular. But the production of multime-

dia artifacts demands guidance for both engineers de-

veloping software and designers generating content.

This is a clear obstacle for non-technical technology

aware authors (or educators) that want to produce

multimedia educational software to be used in their

teaching activities.

Here, we present a document platform, denom-

inated “IntBooks”, that seamlessly aggregates web

technologies (as many as possible) into digital books

(web applications), giving the reader an interactive,

intelligent and rich environment, and authors a “sim-

ple” and collaborative way to build and share them.

The developed platform strives not only for content

deployment but also as a set of tools that enable au-

thoring and re-usage of contents extracted from repos-

itories. In an IntBook production, the author can use

any mixture of formats, be it simple text, HTML,

X, or any other which he is more comfortable

with. It can also embed java-applets (e.g. Geoge-

bra constructions or others), in fact, any current web

technology (e.g. ﬂash objects) and some application

speciﬁc formats. All the source is written in a XML-

structured ﬁle (the IBK format) and the set of tools

takes care of the rest, transforming it accordingly and

as necessary for a consistent web presentation in the

client browser targeted for a speciﬁc device (a PC

with a small or wide screen, a PDA, etc.). Figure 1

presents an example of a IntBook by Pedro Miguel

Duarte of the University of Lisbon, generated from

an IBK ﬁle that contains L

Xand Java applets.

To achieve such high goals, there are a multiplic-

ity of important issues and technical decisions that

303

Rocha E., Breda A., Soares M. and Parreira T. (2009).

AN AUTHORING TOOL FOR DEVELOPING HIGHLY INTERACTIVE DIGITAL BOOKS - The IntBooks Platform.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 302-307

DOI: 10.5220/0001981003020307

 SciTePress

Figure 1: A snapshot of an IntBook, with a double-page

layout, seen in the web browser of a widescreen PC.

must be considered. For example, the platform should

produce digital books that render appealing mathe-

matical expressions and formulae, e.g. to be suitable

for the production of supporting material for courses

at higher levels of education. Among the multiple

types of content, mathematics presents the biggest

challenge, since there is no consensus in the com-

munity about which format is simultaneously better

integrated and produce the best visual results (e.g.

PDF, MathML, LaTeX converted to an image as in

Wikipedia), see (Borwein et al., 2008). Generally and

brieﬂy, we must clarify the following crucial points:

(a) how mathematics (and other media) should be de-

livered and displayed in a large set of different de-

vices; (b) how users interaction should be made and

statistics collected; and (c) how authors may reuse

and mesh up content from different web repositories.

In this work, we convey our point of view, answer-

ing the above questions through the design model and

development of the IntBooks platform. In Section 2,

we focus in the display problem, presenting our “uni-

ﬁed” model. Section 3 gives a sketch idea of how the

platform deploys an IntBook (web application) from

the IBK ﬁle (source code). The user interaction is

discussed in Section 4 and the aggregation concept in

Section 5. Section 6 makes a brief explanation of the

platform management and access control. Finally, in

Section 7 we present a particular digital book, cov-

ering the new curricula in mathematics for the 5th

and 6th grades of the Portuguese Education System,

which is a clear example of the potential and features

of our authoring tool.

2 CONTENT MESH UP DISPLAY

In our everyday use of Internet and web experience,

we interact with a multitude of technologies capable

of displaying different types of documents and en-

abling different types of interaction. The most com-

mon are HTML and Javascript, but also Flash, SVG,

Java, etc.. Browsers enable the presentation of con-

tent through external plugins or mechanisms already

embed in their source code. Authoring complex web

content requires more than one tool and various steps.

Often one has to take a priori in account the ﬁnal lay-

out, the target device screen dimensions and capabil-

ities, and the software to be used, before its real pro-

duction. IntBooks reduces signiﬁcantly the effort to

create online interactive books, feeding content from

various formats and sources. These pushes for the

need of an uniﬁed and coherent representation of con-

tent, not only to avoid dependencies but also to be

able to transform between formats (sources) in a con-

sistent way. A ﬁle format speciﬁcation was designed,

in order to comprise such needs and to be extensible

to open formats (see subsection 2.1). The user should

also be able to produce rich content, regardless of end

form of presentation, in the software more familiar to

him. IntBooks takes this into account, and makes an

effort to support as many formats as possible, and put

your content where it needs to be, and how it needs

to be. Using a back-end set of tools, it transforms the

input into the suitable format for web usage.

Figure 2 shows a IntBook’s page which was gen-

erated from three different source formats.

Figure 2: A snapshot of a calculus IntBook, where different

source fragments are marked with boxes: L

X(the bottom

boxes), Java applets (the interactive graphs), and HTML

(the ﬁgure captions).

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2.1 Structure and Language

The proprietary source package is a ZIP ﬁle contain-

ing a XML based ﬁle, so-called IBK ﬁle, and external

binary ﬁles (e.g. images, videos, SWF ﬁles, etc.). The

IBK ﬁle main purpose is to be a consistent container

and structured aggregator of the different source for-

mats (called IBK fragments, embed in speciﬁc XML

tags), which additionally has the ﬁle referencing for

the external binary content. It is a ﬁle structure in-

tended for multi-format document amalgamation, ed-

itable in any simple text editor. In what follows, there

is an example of the top level syntax of an IBK ﬁle:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<intbook-system>

(information / parameters setting commands)

</header>

<body>

(fragment / block commands)

</body>

</book>

</intbook-system>

The IBK ﬁle is then parsed and processed by con-

version tools and ﬁlters, which apply to each frag-

ment, in order to generate a visually consistent and

interactive book (see Section 3).

2.2 Different Layouts and Devices

To enable content delivery to different devices some

restrictions would need to be enforced and consid-

ered. Examples of potential targets are, the nowadays

common, mobile devices, which have speciﬁc web

capabilities (varying from manufacture and model),

e.g. screen resolutions and web extensions availabil-

ity are in general very limited. One key point is that

authors (content producers) should not be obliged to

produce different sets of content to different devices.

The platform should (ideally) mold itself accordingly.

However, content size and formation can be a real ob-

stacle. IntBooks make use a set of algorithms that

enable a reasonable and automatic splitting of con-

tent into blocks that best ﬁt in the page size templates,

pre-deﬁned in the IBK ﬁle. This is possible since the

server stores the original IBK source ﬁle, and not a

compiled version, so it enables content re-edition and

output generation on-demand, i.e. content may be

recompiled with different parametrization and tem-

plates to better ﬁt the graphical demands of the sup-

porting layout and the different target devices. Fig-

ure 3 is a snapshot of the same IntBook of Figure 1,

but with a different layout (template).

Figure 3: An IntBook with a one-page layout.

3 DEPLOYMENT

The processing and deployment of the source pack-

age (an IBK ﬁle + a set of external binary ﬁles) is

very technical and deserves to be explained in detail

in a future publication. In short, the processing is sup-

ported by the simple idea of a pipeline of transfor-

mations, where each IBK ﬁle containing some frag-

ments formats are converted into a new IBK ﬁle with

fragments with different formats. For example, we

convert all the L

X to Flash vector scalable objects,

which give the best visual and zooming performance.

After parsing and processing the IBK ﬁle, the out-

put is intended for a multi-user server based environ-

ment. An installation step is needed in the server envi-

ronment. Although this could be a simple package ex-

traction process, and the content exclusively a client

based application, the server-side also enables inter-

action and a user-based session.

Figure 4: The IntBook processing scheme.

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Although access to an IntBook may be restricted

by an optional authentication layer, the installed book

can be readably available for generic usage. Inputting

the book URL into the browser starts the user inter-

action. The IntBooks web-application is responsible

to deliver all the content and multimedia assets to the

user browser, also providing the turn page function-

ality to the book. The generated content that initially

could be supplied in the form of a L

X document,

is now readable and has been transformed, for exam-

ple, into Adobe Flash format. The server is also re-

sponsible to choose the most suitable output format,

according to the browser capabilities.

For more sophisticated IntBooks, the server de-

livers a web-service for variables storage where the

client application can read and optionally write. This

functionality is conﬁgured as part of the IBK ﬁle. The

IntBook’s example TexMat (see Section 7) makes in-

tensive use of this functionality, making it a highly

responsive environment to user interaction (e.g. al-

lowing randomly generated exercises).

4 RICH USER INTERACTION

The basic user interaction for every IntBook layout

is the page turning functionality. But this can be a

little limiting to the content that can be delivered. To

warp this, a read/write link is available for the client-

side delivered content, enabling conditionality linked

to the smallest user interaction. This way during user

interaction with the book, let’s say a particular page as

a multiple choice survey, and the next question would

only appear after the previous is correct, using this

read/write link, the client application could check if

the answer was correct and record every answer the

user would give.

Implementing a similar functionality with page

refreshing would drastically increase band-width re-

quirements, create a not so smooth user interaction,

and would probably break page navigation. This is

a relevant characteristic to maximize the user expe-

rience and intended for quizzes, pools, surveys, ex-

ercises, tests, etc, and it’s achieved through storable

variables on the server. It enables the application to

“remember” the user, and the user to review all of his

past answers.

These server variables are strong-typed and de-

clared in the IBK ﬁle. During installation on the

server the variables are allocated for a per user instan-

tiation and changes to these variables are logged for

usage by reporting tools.

5 AGGREGATION AND

RE-USABILITY

In this topic we simply use the classical idea of “re-

use, not repeat”. IntBooks can also be viewed as a

collaborative system, where a particular book can be

built from fragments of other books or from other en-

tire books. Different authors may work, for exam-

ple, in different books, in different formats and merge

everything in a uniform book. Obviously, the author

dependencies are kept during all the process. Since

the IBK format is a format for fragmented content,

entire chapters can be imported from book to book.

Because disciplines have similar chapters, concepts

are interconnected. Since some courses are created

from the merge of two intensive book courses and not

all information is relevant, re-utilization is a key fea-

ture. Avoids content repetition and guarantees that an

explained concept has only one meaning across the

various books. The mechanism that manages frag-

ments also incorporates bridges to some web reposi-

tories (e.g. for extracting L

X source from Planet-

Math).

This linking between books is dynamic, so when

a chapter or concept is improved with examples, the

other books using that source are also improved. As

future work we plan to improve the search engine that

allow authors to ﬁnd and link published contents of

other IntBooks into their own books.

6 USER MANAGEMENT

As in most e-learning platforms, there is a trend to

mimic the organizational hierarchy of an institution.

In a learning environment there are the obvious stu-

dent and teacher roles, and as in any user-based plat-

form there are the typical administrator and manager.

The IntBooks platform is no exception, and it re-

quires a centralized, delivering and control system.

The created authentication, authorization system, was

molded as an institution library, makes only sense, be-

cause our object of development was centered on the

book. An institution may have various libraries (sets

of books) and books may be categorized. A teacher

assigns a book to his teaching class (set of users),

and all the students (users) can start using it. This

might appear to be a complex system, but it’s also

very scalable. It can be as simple as an administra-

tor uploading the books, and creating user accounts,

and it’s ready for usage. Using teachers role, enables

decentralized management of users and permissions.

This role is also meant for accessing the students data,

and statistics collection. The administration system

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306

enables creation of groups of institutions and sub-

institutions (departments or pedagogical groups), al-

lowing for the propagation of roles and books across

all sub-institutions. A user might have different roles

in different sub-institutions, for example: be an ad-

ministrator of physics department and only a teacher

in mathematics department, and a student of a art

book. A sub-institution can have its exclusive users

that are not users of the mother-institution. The ad-

ministration interface model makes the IntBooks plat-

form a vertical solution, enabling its deployment on

large organizations. Figure 5 shows part of the ad-

ministration interface developed as an Adobe Air ap-

plication.

Figure 5: Snapshot of the Administration interface.

7 TEXMAT: A MATHEMATICAL

INTBOOK EXAMPLE

TexMat is a highly interactive digital book covering

the new curricula in mathematics for the 5th and 6th

grades of the Portuguese Education System. Its de-

sign includes several features and capabilities as mul-

tilingual, modularity, the ability of being easily ex-

tendable by teachers (e.g., adding Geogebra construc-

tions), model generated exercises, open questions,

and centralized gathering of students statistics and as-

sessments. But, technically, TexMat is a IntBook.

A particular IntBook, sharing the same structure, but

with additional features, specially designed for this

book, since the target students need some particulari-

ties, mainly in the design and interaction level. In fact,

TexMat was the application that originated IntBooks.

Instead of developing a speciﬁc system, we have ex-

panded the idea for a more general and abstract sys-

tem that can build and control every book designed to

be an IntBook, where TexMat can be included.

7.1 Content Display

In TexMat, almost every page is composed using

Macromedia Flash. Because we are interested in

keeping the users answers to the questions and in

changing the appearance of several objects (visibil-

ity of text, images, animations, etc.) according to the

users accesses and interactions with the book, it was

necessary to deﬁne a communication protocol (using

XML) to exchange information between the Flash ob-

jects and the server database. The IBK ﬁle, presented

above, must now have more information about the dy-

namic variables and questions of any ﬂash object.

Here is an portion of the TexMat IBK ﬁle, that

represents a ﬂash page:

<page>

<vars_layout fName="GF19" src="flash" width="712" height="476"/>

<vars_state>

</vars_state>

</questions>

</flash>

</page>

Because of these dynamic variables, the book ap-

pearance changes in every usage, according to each

user’s performance.

7.2 User Interaction

As any IntBook, TexMat has two well-deﬁned modes:

student mode and teacher mode. However, in this par-

ticular case both modes have some extras, in addition

to visit or edit the book.

7.2.1 Student Mode

Each user (student) must be associated with (at least)

one teacher, and this deﬁnes the user’s navigation in

this particular book. While the student is interact-

ing with the book, it goes changing (invisible text

or images become visible, answers are given, im-

ages changed) and these changes are registered in a

database. They become visible in the next user visit

and in the teacher’s view.

During the navigation, an interactive agent (de-

veloped in Macromedia Flash) guides the student

through the book. It reacts to the user’s actions ac-

cording to his/her answers and controls the progress

in the book, as we can see in Figure 6.

Also during the navigation process, and when a

speciﬁc concept is explained in the book, it is added to

the user’s notebook, where he/she can add a particular

note about the concept. The notebook is individual

and can be acceded in any moment the user wants. If

it is called from inside the lesson with a concept, goes

directly to the respective deﬁnition of the associated

concept. Otherwise, the notebook application opens

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307

Figure 6: The TexMat agent reaction.

in search mode, permitting the user to search every

concept in his/her own notebook.

7.2.2 Teacher Mode

As an editor, the teacher has full control over his/her

own book, and may share it (or parts of it) with other

teachers. Starting from the default TexMat book, a

teacher can delete or add pages, in every location.

He/She can construct a sub-book of Geometry, for ex-

ample, deleting the remainder of the book. But, more

interesting than deleting is adding. With a simple in-

terface, adding pages to a book is a simple action that

does not require high knowledge of web tools, and

this operation can be previewed in real-time and be

approved or not. Every type of document that can be

viewed in the web can be added to the book, e.g. text,

images, HTML, pdf, java applets, etc.. As a teacher,

he/she has information about all his/her students’ per-

formances, receives the open question responses and

may interact with the students directly from the book,

sending particular messages or giving homework for

a particular student or for all the class.

7.3 TexMat in Classroom

Not pretending tobe a substitute for the classical man-

uals or competing with the math classes, TexMat can

be used as a complement in the classroom. Specially

the animations and videos can be very useful for ex-

plaining a concept, and the large amount of exercises

can be used to practise. Also, the teacher can give

homework directly from the book, during the class.

In this case, the students are informed of the fact in

the next time they open the book.

Another interesting feature of TexMat is that it can

be used to plan particular lessons in the classroom.

Since a teacher can add pages to his/her own book,

he/she can prepare lessons from TexMat, using the in-

cluded lessons or using only the platform with his/her

own contents.

8 CONCLUSIONS

In this work, we have brieﬂy discussed an authoring

tool platform for an integrated and consistent deliv-

ered of multimedia content (containing different tech-

nologies) suitable to be presented in different layouts

and devices, reducing the authors (content producers)

effort in learning a speciﬁc set of technologies. This

platform, by the set of features and structure model, is

clearly different from standard projects as Wikipedia

(or PlanetMath), iPaper or Google docs. In some

sense, IntBooks could be viewed as a learning man-

agement systems and the generated books as learning

objects. Its interface emphasizes the historical learn-

ing source of knowledge, the book. Integration of

LMS and SCORM standards is an optional work in

process. IntBooks has the simplistic model of creat-

ing the smallest dependencies needed to achieve the

maximum features possible. Basing development in

the standards would hurt development, and restrict

ideology implementation. In this way, and using a

KIS (keep it simple) architecture, standard compli-

ance is a feasible future. Maintaining the sources,

would be just a matter of adjusting the ﬁlters, to pro-

duce a compliant SCO. The IBK format, is intended

for compilation, where as other formats deal with the

compiled media form of the documents, emphasizing

in document fragments, and enabling content reorga-

nization, after installation, where as SCO’s are the in-

divisible learning unit of general LMS. In IntBooks,

content can be reorder to the simplest paragraph.

We hope that in, the future, IntBooks turn to be

an favored and useful tool for authors to express their

way of organizing and presenting educational content

in a highly interactive and appealing form.

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Chang, S. (2000). Multimedia Software Engineering.

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McKerlie, D. and Preece, J. (1993). The hype and the

media: Issues concerned with designing hypermedia.

Journal of Microcomputer Applications, 16, 33–47.

McKethan, R., Everhart, B., and Sanders, R. (2001). The

effects of multimedia software instruction and lecture-

based instruction on learning and teaching cues of

manipulative skills on preservice physical education

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