Process approach in
elearning
 
Jiří Kolář
Presentation summary
• Context
• Motivation
• Learning processes
• Goals of my Phd.
•  MEDUSY project
• Problems and pitfalls
Context
Classic learning approach
• Students sit in classroom, taking notes
• Speaker is important
• Chalk and blackboard do the trick
• Books, books and books
• Works well for theory inputs
• Theory have to be understood, no hands-on needed
 
• Simple and do not demand any extra equipment
• Students have to concentrate and really study
Context (cont.)
Distant elearning
• Students sit at home behind their PCs
• They read online documents
• They fill online questionaries, tests ,quizes
• They watch videos
 
• Works only for simple learning content
• Lot of effort on elearning content designer
• Quality of acquired knowledge is usually poor
• Nonsense?
Context (cont.)
Blended learning
• Combines classical approach with elearning
• Classwork is usually higly interactive
• Classwork is tight with elearnning activities
• Elearning influence classwork significantly
 
• Works well for technical education where hands-on
part is important
 
• Course structure and organisation is quite complex
• Good planning is important
Context (cont.)
Business process 
• Defined sequence of steps generating a value
• Steps can be manual or automated tasks
• "Executable workflow diagram"
  
BPM - Business process management
Consists of
• Modelling
• Automated execution
• Monitoring and optimization 
of business processes
 
 
Learning processes
Example:
 
Motivation
• Good blended learning course is complex workflow
• Today's LMSes purely content-based
• Lot of services on web can be leveraged
• Lot of things can be automatized
• More and more technical tasks needed
• We do not want to plan also long-term education
process
 
• Good learning management =
o Good control over learning process
o Space for improvements
Motivation (cont.)
Education of IT professionals
• Technologies evolve quicky
• IT professionals have to learn constantly
• Hands on technolgy is very important
• Various technical tasks necessary
• Long term education planning is important
• Management should have control over employees
education
Goals of my Phd.
• Leverage process aproach in elearning context
• Provide guidelines how to apply this approach
 
    Create environment (tools) for
o Modeling
o Execution
o Monitoring
    of learning processes
• Create repository of common learning patterns
• Create enviroment for long-term education
management
MEDUSY project
• Open source project
• Hosted @ sourceforge
• Done within industry partenerhip with RedHat
• Done within OPVpK of Doc. Matyas
 
• http://www.medusy.sf.net
MEDUSY project (cont.)
Rough architecture:
 
MEDUSY Project
• Current status:
o Analysis, rich documentation and int. prototype
done
• Process modelling & execution
o BPMN 2.0 (Web 2.0 modeller,BPMN 2.0 engine)
o Learning patterns as custom subprocesses
• Used services
o Classic LMSes - mostly Moodle - WS over SOAP
o Virtual labs
o Suddenly IS MUNI does not provide any WS :(
Problems and pitfalls
• Open Source BPM software is not yet matured
• Lecturers and teachers are conservative :)
• Aditional effort have to be spend on modelling
• Elearning services have to be developed
• Knowledge management importance not clear to
eveybody
Thanks for attention
Questions?