Towards a pattern language approach to establishing personal authoring environments in e-learning

Establishing a suitable environment for multimedia course production is important for e-learning authors. Such an environment includes two primary components: an authoring station for preparing the artifacts and a physical workplace where authoring takes place. The establishment of the environment is a non-trivial task because it involves several disciplines such as IT, pedagogy, and human-computer interaction. Inspired by Christopher Alexander's work on pattern languages, this paper proposes a pattern language for establishing personal authoring environments in e-learning. The pattern language takes the end-user perspective and can be applied by people with interests in creating a personal authoring environment for producing quality e-learning contents. Its use is illustrated with an example.