Constructing e-learning tools from heuristic methods: multiple whys, circle of analogies and stepwise convergence

I discuss various methods which may benefit from online implementation, supporting e-learning in the area of creativity and effective thinking at all educational levels, from kindergarten to graduate programs. All procedures comprise a virtual laboratory, capable of generating actual creative olutions to real problems. Tools for creative thinking may be implemented as online procedures allowing the user to conduct heuristic group sessions. I provide examples of individual-user heuristic methods (multiple Why? questions, circle of analogies) and a group-based method (discussion 66 which involves stepwise convergence of ideas generated by semi-independent subgroups)

Features of an e-learning environment which promote critical and creative thinking: choice, feedback, anonymity, and assessment

I discuss features that are important for creative and critical thinking which should be recreated in e-learning applications. Anonymity maximizes chances for development of creativity and for objective and accurate assessment. I also describe a ‘quadruple anonymity’ system implemented at Nowy Sacz Business School – National-Louis University in Poland, the goal of which is to improve objectivity of thesis evaluation by referees. E-learning environment is ideal for implementing functionalities which make choice, feedback, and controlled anonymity easily available to the users to be effective, feedback should be appropriately timed, incremental, impartial, and impersonal. Evaluation of student or employee performance or of proposed ideas or solutions should rely on explicitly stated quantitative criteria, developed along well thought-through measurement scales and utilising proper descriptive statistics and visualisation methods. A description of the nominal group heuristic method is provided as an example of a heuristic method which relies on creativity, anonymity and unbiased evaluation

Enhancing the privacy of e-learning systems with alias and anonymity

The privacy of e-learning systems has become a big concern. This paper proposes a new approach, which can effectively protect the privacy of e-learning users. We propose to use the alias and anonymity to implement the privacy preservation for e-learning systems. Through the approach, a unique alias represents the real e-learning user to communicate with each other or e-learning users use the anonymity to hide their information. This approach can be very simple and efficient to be implemented in the e-learning system by well designed meta-formats of digital identities of four types of e-learning users. The anonymity can be adopted by all e-learning users to keep their privacy

Open source software development process for the development of open source e-learning systems

Over the last decade, numerous educational institutions and corporate world have employed various kinds of e-learning software solutions. One of the major components of end-to-end e-learning solution is the learning management system (LMS). These LMS are either developed as open source software (OSS) or close source software (CSS) product. In this regard, CSS for e-learning systems has a major drawback of being expensive and this hinders its widespread use. On the other hand, OSS is virtually free and not restricted by the licensing costs. The benefits of OSS can be completely realized only if there is an effective contribution from OSS community towards its development. It is clear from the literature that the OSS development community does not follow an explicitly defined and documented software development process. This in turn results in lack of detailed information in the literature about the problems arising due to the absence of a defined process. Nevertheless, some of the major issues with regard to OSS development for LMS that have been identified include software design issues, week user Interface, lack of complete and accessible documentation, lack of co-ordination between unknown developers, etc. This research develops a generalized OSSD process that could be used for the development of an open source (OS) e-learning system. To begin, in order to understand the current development practises of the existing OS e-learning systems, a detailed analysis was carried out for three different and popular OS e-learning systems (Moodle, ILIAS and Dokeos). The result of this analysis was represented as an Activity Flow Diagram which enabled precise identification of the implicit software development stages. In the next stage, in order to identify the output produced for each and every stage of development, a DEMO methodology was applied and DEMO models were built for three e-learning systems (Moodle, ILIAS and Dokeos). This is a particularly novel contribution that helps enable the development of the generalized OSSD process. In order to select the different stages of development for the proposed process, the output resulting from each stage of the DEMO model was compared with the outputs prescribed by the ISO/IEC 12207:2008 standard. Further, in order to validate the proposed process, an expert review method was employed by preparing a web-based questionnaire and circulating it along with the proposed process to three different and geographically separated OS experts. The proposed process was subsequently refined based on the feedback received from these experts. It is anticipated that the proposed OSSD process had the potential to streamline the future development of OS e-learning systems