The Concept for a Flexible Authoring and Learning Environment

Abstract

This paper describes the concept for a flexible authoring and learning environment and is presented at the workshop “Learning Systems for Environmental Informatics”. It starts defining the requirements for the important flexibility of learning systems in respect to the current background of the learner, the dynamic ordering in which content is presented to the learner – also with consideration of the individual progress a learner makes – and the opportunity for the learner to proceed on many different paths in an exploratory way of learning. To reach this flexibility it is required that a single page consists of several so called content units, which are arranged dynamically during runtime of a learning session. A page generator module controls the actual arrangement of the content units. The page generator gets its information from different components (i.e. databases) such as individual user data, a course program, a content unit library and so on. For a unified layout of the pages the content units are arranged on the base of (configurable) templates. The concept shows how the learning environment component is interconnected to the authoring component, course management component and administration component to build an integrated and complete system.