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.
Emphas ize 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 references) to browse for information.
The model e-learning system
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