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 categories which
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.
4. 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:
o
Cognition: The ability to perceive and understand new information quickly.
o
Memory: The ability to retain and retrieve information in any form.
The model e-learning system
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