Delivering courses modelled using IMS Learning Design

E-learning promises efficiency of education. This promise is based on the economics of multiple delivery, whereby initial production costs for an e-learning course are recouped by delivering the course to different groups of learners at different times. This can only be realised by distinguishing between abstract representations of courses and instances of these representations involving specific sets of learners. This article provides an analysis of the requirements for multiple deliveries of courses. It describes the design of an approach which meets these requirements in the domain of integrated e-learning systems, together with experiences resulting from implementation of the design. The article concludes with a discussion of the approach.