E-learning is a learning system rather than an education system.

It has been four years since I started developing the enterprise e-learning system. In the past four years, there have been many things to talk about, so the following are some nonsense. No.

Almost every e-learning system is named "Anytime", "Anywhere", and claims that this is a networked learning method. However, I think most e-learning systems only exist as teaching systems rather than learning systems.

Education

The explanation of the commentary is "teaching, practice, and effect", and "Cultivation and Cultivation ". The passage of the word "education" in Modern Chinese is linked with the modernization of Chinese education, hoping to change from "learning-oriented" to "Teaching-oriented.

In the West, education comes from the Latin educate. This is meant to be "Export" or "Export ". The word "education" in the West is an inner implication. It is emphasized that education is a natural activity. It aims to bring out the inherent or potential qualities of natural persons from the inside out to become a realistic development state.

Learning

Learning refers to the persistent changes in behaviors, hard work, and psychological tendencies caused by the learner's experience. These changes are not caused by maturity, disease, or drugs, and do not necessarily show explicit behavior.

Learning System

The changes produced by learning come from two aspects: Professor and experience. Obviously, "education" is only a source of learning changes. However, most of the current learning systems focus on "education. That is, in a specific place (if we use the e-learning system as a place ), a specific number of materials and strategies (typically provided by LMS and LCMS) are used to assist the system in achieving the target. It is actually an "education" system. Or we can call it e-educating system.

In addition to the target education system, the learning system should pay more attention to "experience ". However, the acquisition of such "experience" is often not provided by specific places and special materials. Even if we can assume that a specific place and a specific number of materials are far beyond the scope of the individual, the system does not fully record and understand the user's "experience" process.

This problem is partly caused by the emergence of managers as "educators" rather than "learners.

In order to define the user's knowledge level, there are currently no particularly effective methods except for specific target restrictions (such as passing the assessment. However, the achievement of goals is essentially based on existing experience. Managers and systems themselves have not benefited from the process from the user's learning to achieving specific goals, it is even unknown whether the user has actually reached a specific level of knowledge.

There is an idiom in China called "Teaching and Learning": "It's just learning, learning, and learning. If you do not know enough, you will be able to perform self-defense, and then you will be able to perform self-improvement. ." Both teaching and learning affect each other and promote each other. I think this sentence is also applicable to the design of e-learning system: e-learning system is a learning system that can guide users to reach a specific level of knowledge through various experiences, at the same time, managers and systems are more mature based on the learning experience of different users. E-learning is a teaching feedback system.

Feedback Methods

Most e-learning systems obtain feedback through questionnaires. In the network environment, unless your questionnaire can be linked to a specific interest or be fully socialized, the information you obtain may be meaningless in most cases.

Whether from an objective perspective or from a cost perspective, obtaining the user's activity track for a certain target should be a more effective feedback method. However, the prerequisite for the effectiveness of this method is that the e-learning system has a wide range of information so that users seldom need to find materials on their own. At present, in addition to the enterprise e-learning system (the confidentiality of the enterprise's own technology and network access restrictions), few systems may be able to do this. However, we still have the ability to indirectly achieve this by listing the Reference URL.

In terms of architecture, e-learning designers should pay enough attention to the user's activity information. In a sense, such activity information is better than recording a user's course, it is more important to obtain scores for a certain test. User activity data should be treated as first-class data.

The user activity information is recorded in the form of logs. It contains four parts, namely, when the "subject" is and what information "is operated on ". This is very similar to the Web analytic record format. The next step is to process the data. Processing is divided into three stages.

The first stage is to determine whether the user has achieved an activity goal based on the data. Since this approach is similar to the traditional concept of "pass the exam", it is necessary to draw a conclusion using all rather than partial data. Although the number of samples of user activity information is very large, this data is often easily selected because of a fixed pattern (for example, most systems still use the assessment method to confirm the achievement of the goal. To determine whether the user has achieved the goal, we only need to pay attention to the user who answered the XX Question of the XX exam, the answer is XX." And these records can be quickly filtered by the "What operation" index ).

The second stage is data mining. If the first part is "e-education", this part focuses on the user's "experience ". Summarize the learning experience from the user's "experience. For example, in the process of learning from the beginning to achieving the goal, the user's information (such as difficulty, type, subject relevance) and order information are obtained, summarize All roadways for users to achieve their goals, classify routes, and discover new correlations between learning materials ).

The third part is to try to apply the experience of the second stage to a purposeful application. However, the objective is to remove the erroneous conclusions in the second stage. If, after applying the data for a period of time, the growth of the positive coefficient is obtained through the same analysis method as that of the previous data mining, and the positive coefficient is greater than a set value, it is deemed that the application has positive feedback. It can be formally incorporated into the experience library.

Limitations of e-Learning

After recognizing the above analysis method, we can find that e-learning systems are more likeCommunityWebsite. User behavior is more valuable than data in the system. However, the current e-learning system, from system design to data standards (such as SCORM, qti, AICC, and so on) has a very strong closeness. He has fundamentally increased the learning cost (the data format is not mainstream data storage forms, such as pages, PDF documents, PPT handouts, and audio and video materials. It is often necessary to re-create or package learning activities), limiting the learning activities (must rely on the e-learning platform, such as learning activities must be managed and initiated in LMS ). It is not conducive to the formation of a unified knowledge expression system. It can be said that this is the contradiction between the open nature of network learning and the closed form of e-learning systems.

Breaking the Conflict: API and Discipline Classification

Given the complexity of learning activities, it is impossible to unify e-learning from a very fine angle. However, from a large perspective, there are two points that will be implemented gradually:

(1) records of Learning behaviors: "who", "when", "What information", and "What operations" will become the most important part of the learning system. This part is fully capable of unified from the API. (Currently, tincan API has taken a solid step in this direction .)

(2) Unified subject classification: the rise of social learning has the need to share experience (like search engine marketing, it should have business prospects ). Experience Sharing must be completed on the premise of accurate knowledge expression. Therefore, standardized subject classification expressions will be gradually implemented (currently, there are a wealth of such expressions as wiki classification ).

E-learning functions exist

In short, I think e-learning is not a system-level module, but a "function" module attached to the system. I believe that the construction of a closed e-learning system will eventually be broken. E-learning will be appended to every society or individual website like a virus, widely spreading, connecting, and integrating into all aspects of the network.