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improve development time, user acceptance levels
and help anticipate major changes in organizational
process and required competencies.
For process owners or managers, the results of
data analysis (self-reported and coming from system
database) will allow obtaining performance metrics.
They will be of great value to estimate the
usefulness, effectiveness, articulation of results and
strategies, return of investment of this kind of
initiatives, and support later business-driven
decisions. Within current business environment, this
will be a useful feature for all kind of organizations
to be competitive.
6 FUTURE WORK
As our knowledge of the fundamentals of e-Learning
requirements and praxis improves, we expect to
derive useful models to assist courseware developers
in developing high-quality resource-effective
learning materials and interactive courseware. Four
areas for future work were identified
First, we believe that collaboration and
personalisation are two essential requirements for
learning effectiveness. SEMINOLE lacks the ability
to: (a) allow students to specify personalization
features; (b) promote cooperation and collaboration
among students and instructors from local and
remote universities, and (c) foster collaborative work
among instructors and students In traditional
classrooms, students have their own materials
available; they chose what to take to a classroom and
in what way they want to take notes. Thus,
improvements could be added in order to: (a)
enhance the feeling of belonging and social presence
(Tu, 2002); (b) allow students to specify
personalized features, for example, each student
could be notified of the archived materials he/she
has not yet seen, and (c) enhance the publication
workflow. Currently, materials are prepared outside
the learning environment, and once they are ready
for publication they are added to the archives.
Again, as students should be able to share
documents and learning materials among
themselves, instructors could also be able to create
their materials online in a collaborative manner.
Second, from a technological standpoint,
SEMINOLE’s development will be directed towards
two main goals: (a) improving cost-efficiency, and
(b) increasing instructor and student immersion/
interactivity. The system’s interface and workflow
will be simplified by optimizing pre and post-
production processes. This way a “one man show”
scenario can be possible. Tests with low-cost and
highly available hardware have already begun. In
these tests, a camera was replaced by a webcam, and
the media-encoding server and instructor
presentation computer were replaced by a single
laptop. Additionally, multimedia content
distribution presents several challenges for
SEMINOLE: (a) webcast delay, and (b) network
bandwidth requirements. To face these challenges,
three options were analyzed. Replacing unicast
streaming with multicast streaming can reduce
bandwidth requirements (Multicast Streaming,
2005), but raises several issues when deployed in a
heterogeneous network environment since “a large
portion of the Internet is not multicast-enabled”
(Yeo, Lee & Er, 2002). Tunneling between
multicast-enabled networks (Francis, 2000)
potentially solves the bandwidth issue, but the live
media delay remains. Research in peer-to-peer
content distribution may solve both bandwidth
concerns and live content delay. This is based on the
principle that interested content receivers will be
willing to resend it (Yeo, Lee & Er, 2002;
Xu,
Xianliang, Mengshu & Chuan, 2005).
Third, planning standardized contents using
Sharable Content Object Reference Model
(SCORM) for multiple assets, such as presentations,
simulations or webcasts, is under way. Also,
building basic learning objects from previous raw
classes’ contents, through the process of
standardization, is another step. Then, with sets of
basic learning objects, we will develop SCOs
(Shareable Content Object). A SCO represents the
lowest level of granularity of learning resources that
can be tracked by a Learning Management System
(LMS) (Advanced Distributed Learning, 2004).
Each SCO will have a predetermined sequence and
can be seamlessly used for multiple course lessons.
Lessons are created from groups of SCOs that can
contain a concept, fact, procedure, process or
principle (Cisco Systems, 2003). Adding Learning
Objects Metadata (LOM) is also planned. LOM
makes SCO more reusable, since instructors can
search and find them easily. Issues resulting from
SCO usage will be analyzed, among them:
increasing or decreasing contents granularity;
choosing a set of basic learning objects to build a
SCO; selecting the right SCOs to build a lesson, and
finding an organization or navigation structure.
This approach, using standards like SCORM (or
others), brings advantages by making it possible to
use materials from different sources into the future
standard-compliant SEMINOLE. Changing the
learning environment will have no extra costs,
beside a new course deployment, because there will
be no need to change the SCO itself. This achieves
interoperability among user technologies. Standards
provide a common data model and by using a
standard-compliant SEMINOLE potentially assures
WEB-BASED SUPPORT FOR RESOURCE-EFFECTIVE E-LEARNING
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