Creation of the reusable learning content in the process of work is a challenging but promising trend in e-learning and knowledge management. While the main research focus nowadays is concentrated on the extraction of the tacit knowledge and experience using wikis and blogs, the fact is ignored that a lot of useful process-relevant information already exists on the web or in the enterprise document management systems (DMS) and needs to be brushed up and integrated into processembedded learning scenarios. The proposed approach helps knowledge workers to transform documents found on the web and in the enterprise DMS into reusable learning objects and make them available for adaptive workplace learning.
Recent studies in Germany showed [
The current article is structured as follows: The chapter 2 introduces to a problem of content authoring for small enterprises and defines requirements to an efficient process of content authoring. In 3 an overview of currently used authoring strategies is given. In 4 we make a proposition of the optimized process of process-integrated authoring (SLEAM). The article concludes in chapter 5 by giving idea of the future work.
Assuming, a small company realizes the necessity of process-embedded e-learning and would like to introduce e-learning solution. The first problem thet the company might face is that the responsible manager does not know what type of learning content and on which topic do they really need. The company does not also have means to hire a specialist to analyze the learning domain and produce e-learning content. In this case, preparing of learning content has to be a part of the employees’ job. As the learning content creation is not the main job of the employees, the process of the content creation must take as little time as possible.
Considering the situation described above, one can derive the following requirements to: 1. The process of the learning content authoring: (a) Must be performed by company insiders without taking them from the main work for too long therefore it has to be integrated into the process of work and use tools that are easy to learn. (b) Authoring tools should be able to convert existing documents or web pages into learning objects (LOs) rather that creating LOs from scratch. 2. The output of the content authoring process: (a) Produced content should be fine-grained learning objects rather than executable learning programs. (b) Produced learning objects should be annotated with metadata according to a standard format in order to be able to be imported into LCMS. 3
Currently, there exist a lot of different approaches to learning content development. We will evaluate them with respect to the requirements listed in the previous chapter. 3.1
Instructional system design is one of the systematic approaches to the learning
program creation [
Result: ADDIE does not satisfy our requirements 3.2
Rapid Instructional Design (RID) tries to solve problems of ADDIE by
simplifying its process. For instance, in [
Result: RID does not satisfy all our restrictions, but is better suitable for smaller budgets. The idea of testing the content before development is highly relevant to the requirements defined in chapter 2. But, the main target of the RID is a systematic creation of training courseware, whereas the authors of this paper propagate an approach supporting adaptive informal learning in working processes. 3.3
Nowadays there is a lot of so called “rapid authoring“ tools appeared that allow
non-professionals to create learning courses in standard sharable formats using
existing MSOffice documents (see [
Result: Re-purposing of the learning content is what a small company really needs. But the methodology of integrating such framework into company processes is missing. Rapid authoring tools are easy to use and allow to convert documents into LOs. But produced LOs are monolithic, coarse-grained and contain lot of garbage information. Therefore, they are difficult to reuse as part of adaptive courses. 3.4
In [
Result: weblogs and wikis are simple intuitive tools for the “from-scratch“ content creation. It means that our approach has to consider them as a very important source of information that can be repurposed as reusable LOs.
Having analyzed the overview from chapter3, the authors proposed a new
approach of the process-embedded content authoring called SLEAM that stands
for Search, Learn, Extract, Annotate, Map that are the main phases of the
authoring process. In the fig. 1 the main phases of SLEAM are shown in the
working context:
1. After a user starts a new task, a knowledge gap preventing the user to
perform the task might be identified. Identification of the knowledge gap can
be done by the working environment (e.g. workflow management system, see
[
Comparing SLEAM to the authoring approaches listed in chapter 3 one can find that the SLEAM approach integrates main features of rapid-authoring and context-aware authoring, but: 1. SLEAM enhances rapid authoring methods by providing tools for LO extraction from the documents instead of converting the whole documents to LOs. 2. Unlike wiki-based authoring SLEAM practitioners do not have to create some learning content, but to reuse existing documents. 3. Unlike context-aware content repurposing, SLEAM is working with raw material for creating LOs and not with LOs as such.
Unlike in ADDIE or rapid instructional design approaches where the analysis
phase is given high priority, in SLEAM the methods of dynamic identification
of learning goals ([
SLEAM process solve the most of the requirements defined in chapter 2. It enhances rapid authoring approach by integrating it into the working context and by providing means for selective extraction of LOs.
However the SLEAM approach has several major problems: 1. Employees have to be motivated to produce content. This can be solved, for example by providing browser plugins, that will propose employees to save the documents that they found in internet as LOs. Other plugins can be implemented for the Google Desktop Search or for the interface of the corporate DMS. 2. In order to make the method more lightweight one needs to use automatic metadata extraction mechanism. In this case the author will be assisted during the LO annotation. To better classify LOs and map them to the concepts in the learning concept ontology, text processing algorithms can be used. 3. Copyright problems. The content found in the internet can be protected by copyright laws and must not be reused without an approval by the original author. This problem is difficult to solve by using software algorithms but the users must be aware of the copyright issue.
The subject of the future work on SLEAM will be finding solution to the identified problems. The proposed technology was not evaluated yet, therefore case studies will be planned and conducted.