Supporting self-regulated e-learning with visual topic-map-navigation

Abstract

Teaching and learning at school is changing: students are expected more and more to organize their learning by themselves and also to be responsible for their learning progress by themselves. This creates new demands on the materials and media used to teach and learn. Fixed linearity is blocking, flexibility a great advantage - but it should not lead to missing structure. Topic maps offer the chance to guide the students through huge amounts of information with a carefully measured mixture of freedom and guidance. Topic maps are a rather abstract idea for the average user, so a way to make them usable with ease has to be found. A visualisation of the relevant parts of the topic maps realizes this in an intuitive usable manner. This lead to the development of the LmTM-server http://www.LmTM.de/, an e-learning-server for students at school. The navigation is realized completely via topic maps. The information stored in the topic maps can be extracted in several ways, for a text-based navigation, a graphical navigation, an alphabetical list of topics and a link list in the page footer. The combination of all these variants gives the user a very comfortable means at hand to explore the information on the LmTM-server. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.