The study of requirments of a model e-Learning system

Author:

Prof. P.V.JOBANPUTRA

Head, Dept. Of Computer Sc.

P.D.M.College of Commerce, Rajkot

This paper discusses the pedagogical, technical and functional requirements which have to be fulfilled to provide a model e-Learning system.

1.0 Pedagogical requirements

Up to now many e-learning systems consist of several parts and functions (like system administration, runtime environment, communication, etc.) that are either loosely connected or not connected at all and where no overall educational principles lies behind them. However in a pure virtual learning environment the learners have mostly total control of from where, when and how they acquire the desired knowledge. Therefore the learners have to be guided by the content, the tutors and the system to prevent that they are distracted by too many possibilities. It is also necessary that the system helps the authors when creating and structuring the learning theme and modellinga concept which the trainers have to support.

1.1 Learning Theories

Learning results into behavioural change. Each learning activity should identify their behavioural outcomes. i.e. the module will enable the learner to calculate equations. Or at the end of the learning activity learner will be able to perform writing over CD/DVD. This means that learning occurs under certain conditions that are specially designed to improve learning. Let us focus on three different views on learning environments: behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism.

1.1.1 Behaviorism

Behaviorism concerns itself solely with measurable and observable data and excludes explicit ideas, emotions, and the consideration of inner mental experiences and activities and is not interested in conscious (cognitive) control processes. The brain is understood as a “black box” which gets certain input (“stimuli”) and reacts in a deterministic way. In behaviorist thinking, the focal point of learning is in shaping the responses of the learner. So it requires the appropriate stimuli and to enforce the correct behaviour with adequate feedback.

Thorndike states in “The law of exercises” that the bonds between stimuli and responses are strengthened through being exercised frequently.

J.F. Skinnernoted that the learning process should be divided into "a very large number of very small steps and reinforcement must be contingent upon the accomplishment of each step." Skinner also stated that by making the steps of learning small, the frequency of reinforcement can be increased and the frequency of being wrong is reduced.

Skinner wrote about "teaching machines" which were mechanical devices designed to present educational material to students at their own pace and to reinforce correct responses to the material while preparing the student to respond correctly to subsequent material. He called this method of teaching (whether it used machines or workbooks) programmed instruction. Programmed instruction is a special type of "interactive training".

Behaviorism is therefore well suited for:

  • simple drill & practice patterns, such as
  • learning vocabulary in a language lab or
  • with classical learning software
  • learning psychomotor abilities, such as
  • typewriting, piloting, laboratory work, playing a piano
  • to generate models and mathematical formulas for explaining learning (quantitative description)

Disadvantage of that this kind of learning is it hardly leads to a deeper understanding of the learning content but mainly to factual information. But one of the big dangers is also that stereotyped procedures demotivate the learners.

If the theory of Skinner’s “teaching machine” is applied to a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) we can develop the following requirements for it to support the behavioristic learning theory:

  • The learning content needs to be separated into several small learning units.
  • The VLE has to provide a strict navigation through these units of information, which guarantees that:
  • Only relevant units are presented to the learner according to the prior knowledge/skill set required.
  • The information should be processed (taken up) by the learner and if not it should be reinforced/immediately repeated. This could be done by post-tests and repetitions which are included in the learning paths.

Both this requires active participation and monitoring from learner and teacher/ teaching tool (VLE).

To increase or at least maintain the motivation several measures can help:

  • Add multimedia, interactivity and element of suspense or humour to the learning content as a feedback, so that it is fun to “drill and practice” it.
  • Background libraries, hyper text references, definition or dictionary services will make student not restricted to the information of content only.
  • Skinner’s principle of teaching machine can be used as an extension to the teacher.

1.1.2 Cognitivism

Cognition refers to mental processes that can be described to an experience of feeling or of willing. Cognition includes all processes of consciousness by which knowledge is built up, including topics like conception, perception, recognition and reasoning.

In cognitivism the brain process and transforms is very important.Thereproblem solving is the main way of learning.According to cognitivism that it’s not one answer or reaction to a certain question or stimulus needs to be practiced but more generally the right methods and procedures have to be learned and understood and which of them leads to one or more of the right solutions. It is quite possible that not only one way leads to the optimum result but that several procedures can do this; however all of them will be trained explicitly. Cognitive theories emphasize making knowledge meaningful and helping learners organize and relate new information to existing knowledge in memory. Instructions must be based on a student’s existing mental structures to be effective. Teachers should organize information in such a way that learners are able to connect new information with existing knowledge in some meaningful way. Analogies and metaphors are examples of this type of cognitive strategy.

Such cognitive emphases imply that major tasks of the teacher/ VLE developer include:

  • Every individual has different capacity of getting learning experiences to the situation and it brings different outcome.
  • we should identify different manners to know the previous knowledge, skills and abilities of learner
  • We should arrange practice with feedback so that the new information is effectively and efficiently assimilated and accommodated within the learner’s cognitive structure.

If the cognitivistic model is appliedto e-Learning environments we can derive the following requirements:

  • Emphasis on the active involvement of the learner in the learning process.
  • Self planning the learning process
  • Monitoring learning progress
  • Emphasis on structuring, organizing, and sequencing information to facilitate optimal processing. Support of the use of cognitive strategies such as outlining, summaries, synthesizers or advance organizers by offering tools such as
  • An individual workspace, including simple authoring and structuring tools to summarize and reprocess information
  • Powerful search facilities to locate relevant information
  • Private annotations and typed links and bookmarks, automatically summarized by a learner’s diary.
  • Mind maps
  • Semantic networks
  • Use of hierarchical analyses to identify and illustrate prerequisite relationships (cognitive task analysis procedures). Here again Mind Maps could be of great value.
  • Creation of learning environments that allow and encourage students to make connections with previously learnt material. This should support the recall of prerequisite skills, use of relevant examples and analogies. This could be provided by an:
  • Acquired-skill inventory which is created partly automatically, by summarizing the difference between the pre- and post-test results after successfully finishing a course, and. also includes private entries to reflect additional experiences.
  • Knowledge base (or workspace) organized in a hierarchical or semantic structure and containing collected articles, summaries, annotations and bookmarks.
1.1.3 Constructivism

Constructivism is a theory which is based on results of Piaget's research. It differs from the traditional view that knowledge exists independently of individuals, the view that the mind is a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank tablet upon which a picture can be painted.

Piaget says that there are mental structures that determine how data and new information are perceived. If the new data make sense to the existing mental structure, then the new information is incorporated into the structure. Rather than simply absorbing ideas through endless, repeated rote practice, constructivism posits that students actually invent their ideas. Learning is considered as a reconstruction rather than a transmission of knowledge. Learners assimilate new information to simple, pre-existing notions, and modify their understanding in light of new data. They will reformulate their existing structures only if new information or experiences are connected to knowledge already in memory. Inferences, elaborations and relationships between old perceptions and new ideas must be personally drawn by the students in order for the new idea to become an integrated, useful part of their memory.

This gives an idea how this could be supported by Virtual Learning Environments in e-learning courses:

  • Seek out and use student questions and ideas to guide lessons and whole instructional units.
  • Accept and encourage student initiation of ideas.
  • Promote student leadership, collaboration, location of information and taking actions as a result of the learning process.
  • Use student thinking, experiences and interests to drive lessons.
  • Encourage the use of alternative sources for information both from written materials and experts.
  • Encourage students to suggest causes for event and situations and encourage them to predict consequences.
  • Seek out student ideas before presenting teacher ideas or before studying ideas from textbooks or other sources.
  • Encourage students to challenge each other’s conceptualizations and ideas.
  • Encourage adequate time for reflection and analysis; respect and use all ideas that students generate.
  • Encourage self-analysis, collection of real evidence to support ideas and reformulation of ideas in light of new knowledge.
  • Use student identification of problems with local interest and impact as organizers for the course.
  • Use local resources (human and material) as original sources of information that can be used in problem resolution.
  • Involve students in seeking information that can be applied in solving real-life problems.
  • Extend learning beyond the class period, classroom and the school.
  • Focus on the impact of the learning topic on each individual student.
  • Refrain from viewing content as something that merely exists for students to master on tests.
  • Emphasize career awareness--especially as related to the learning topic.

Many of these suggestions are relevant for the e-learning content author and the teacher who prepare the learning topic and do only little coaching, but most of them can be supported by various tools which the learning environment should provide. In reality this could work like this:

The Teacher will only provide instructions on how to start with the knowledge acquisition. This could be some basic introductory material describing the topic with suggested guidelines and some hints on how and with which means to start. The teacher should decide which tools are offered for the students and are appropriate for them to use to prevent an overload and distracting with too much technology. During the course the teacher has to coach the students with answers to their questions or motivate them by expressing conflicting opinions on the topic, raise new questions or give some hints, but the teachers should not influence the students too much and should not play an active role, because according to Constructivism personal experience is in the foreground and not the helping tutor. At the end or even in between the verification whether the desired knowledge has been really acquired will not be done by an assessment but by a delivery describing and summarizing what they have learnt which can also be judged by other students working on similar topics. The presented material can also be used as an input for new topics.

2.0 Tool-set of e-learning environment

This leads to the following requirements for the tool set of the learning environment:

  • Authoring tool for the teacher to package all descriptions, contents, references and supporting tools which are required to work out the target topic by the students. This package goes beyond what is understood as typical instructional course material.
  • Simple structuring and authoring tools to summarize gained knowledge and present it to others.
  • (Background) libraries and glossaries which include internal material (background stories, electronic books and publications etc.), simulations (emulations of the real world or a connection to a real remote lab) and external material (such as rated and reviewed rences electronic books and publications etc.)s well.ntsbe supported by various tools which the learning environmereferences) to browse for information.
  • Rich and powerful search facilities including full-text, similarity and experts search and scheduled agents which allow learners to search within the internal and the external information.
  • Personal annotation, rating and linking tools which allow working on the material.
  • Cognitive tools such as mind maps and semantic networks to structure gained knowledge.
  • Collaboration features such as team building with shared workspaces and group annotations. Shared calendars and task lists might help to coordinate advanced students and schedule their jobs. Rating/voting tools could support sorting out and rating relevant material, and during the presentation phase allow the other students and the teacher to assess the prepared material.
  • Synchronous and asynchronous communication features, such as discussion forums, messaging with mailing lists, text-, audio-, video chat, question/answer dialogs, shared whiteboards and application sharing tools to communicate with other learners, experts and tutors.

As the reader has perhaps already recognized the cognitivistic and constructivistic approaches to learning and the required tools have quite a lot of similarities to knowledge management, where information also has to be collected, organized and structured and then processed and prepared for delivery to the right people. Here the tasks of a student are quite similar to those of a knowledge worker.

3.0 Model e-Learning environment

One model of e-Learning system which supports the cognitivistic and constructivistic approach can have following points: 1 Learning Goals:

A learning goal consists of a structured collection of learning actions and is defined by a tutor.

2. Knowledge Domains:

Each knowledge domain is a set of documents belonging to a number of predefined semantic categorieswhich includes the definition of a number of attributes.

3. Brainstorming sessions

A brainstorming session is a structured collection of articles of different types like question/answer, idea, supporting/contra argument, comment.

  1. Mentoring sessions

Mentoring session can be used for problem solving with the help of an experienced knowledge worker (so called mentor) via synchronous communication sessions.

3.1 Levels of knowledge

We can classify five levels of knowledge according to learning theories.

  • Level 1 informative
  • Level 2 process
  • Level 3 understanding
  • Level 4 proficiency/skill
  • Level 5 manifestation

3.2 Way of thinking

While developing the model we should consider five ways of thinking:

  • Cognition: The ability to perceive and understand new information quickly.
  • Memory: The ability to retain and retrieve information in any form.
  • Evaluation: The ability to make decisions and to judge correctness, suitability, adequacy, or desirability of information.
  • Convergent production (sometimes called problem solving): The ability to synthesize new information from given information to arrive at what is normally accepted as the best answer or outcome.
  • Divergent production (sometimes referred to as creativity): The ability to generate new information from given information, emphasizing the variety and quality of answers.

e-learning should also consider the thinking patterns of the students in order to achieve the objectives of learning to bring required behavioural changes

4.0 Functional Requirements

  • Personalized learner portal: This will provide the personalized entry to the system and views to the most important personal information.
  • Course catalogues and registration: This enables learners to access catalogue offerings, register, and enrol in the course.
  • Learner-records database, with user-profile.
  • Learner records: contain stored information about the learner, such as job title, organization, location and skills acquired. These cannot be directly edited by the user. Personal preferences, such as delivery mode and language, may be edited by the user.
  • Learner tracking: Learner tracking tracks a learner’s planned learning and progress through e-learning offerings by recording the history, and current status. A learning diary can also track all articles created and documents uploaded by the trainee.
  • Skill gap analysis and personal performance reports visualize the actual skill profile of a certain user, the target skill profile to e.g. reach a certain new position and the potential gap between these two.
  • Reporting tools : With these tools we can access a learning plan/history for each direct report in their reporting chain.
  • Assessment : Pre- and post-assessments are integrated with learning content to deliver a comprehensive curriculum that provides feedback to both learners and managers and adds value to the overall learning experience. Pre-assessments enable learners to study only the necessary material for a task at hand, saving valuable time. Post-assessments provide results that are used to track completion status and are a key element for progress reporting.

5.0 Learning Content Management

  • A Learning Object Repository which supports different granularities of objects, such as :
  • Content Assets, which are the most granular type of objects. Content Assets are raw media such as photographs, illustrations, diagrams, animations, audio and video files, applets or simple text documents etc.
  • Reusable Information Objects (RIOs) are classified as a concept, fact, principle or procedure and are usually described by metadata which give some hints about the (re-)use of the object. To support reuse, RIOs already contain metadata to describe them.
  • Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) are data formed by assembling a collection of (ideally 7±2) relevant reusable information objects to teach a common job task on a single learning objective and are self contained, like e.g. course chapters[i]. RLOs are the first level of granularity where it makes sense to automatically assign its objects to learners based on their skill gap analysis. However this will only happen in systems with very advanced competency management functions, usually only courses, which are the next level of granularity, are assigned to users.
  • Learning Components are a result of bundling and sequencing several learning objects together, such as courses or lessons. Sometimes (i.e. Autodesk Content Strategy Molecular Model View [Hodgins 2001a]) lessons and courses are handled at different levels because a course can consist of multiple lessons.
  • A Learning Environment is the combination of several learning components (i.e. a personal curriculum) together with learning support services, such as communication and collaboration tools.
  • Meta-tagging for search capabilities for
  • Metadata which is steadily bound to the data object, e.g. creation date, size, type etc.
  • Metadata which provides information about the use of the object, because data can be used in various ways and in different contexts. That one should not be stored together with the data, but separately in e.g. multiple areas of the repository for each incarnation. Into the same category falls meta-metadata, which is metadata about the metadata, e.g. the author(s) of the metadata.

6.0Authoring