XpertRule eLearning®

Organising Course Content using Concept Maps

• Concept maps support knowledge driven instruction, which gives the student an overview of the course content and allow the student freedom of navigation and the order of studying the modules.
• Concept maps can display a visual representation of student progress through the course with concepts marked as “completed”, “in progress” and “not currently available”.
• A central repository of learning resources (hyper media contents).
• Support for developing highly graphical concept maps with choice of the shapes, colours, fonts and images for both the concepts and their connecting lines.
• Concept maps contain hyper links to multi media content, websites, other applications, other concept maps or knowledge.
• Support for configurable / adaptive content which selects the course structure and content to meet the students needs.
• Advanced rule based assessment which can be defined for each learning module.

Knowledge Driven Learning

• Using selection rules to select the course content that most suits the student profile and their learning needs.
• Developing training courses for teaching Decision making, Diagnostic, Troubleshooting and Risk assessment skills. While such skills are notoriously difficult to author within most eLearning environments, XpertRule eLearning is particularly good at delivering such systems. This is in part due to the ease of capturing Decision making, Diagnostic, Troubleshooting and Risk assessment know-how using graphical knowledge (trees, tables and decision maps) and knowledge acquisition features (tree induction).
• A concept on a concept map can have a hyper link to a knowledge module. The linked knowledge module can be invoked in a number of ways:
• The hyper link can execute the knowledge to illustrate what decisions are made in a given scenario.
• The hyperlink can display the graphical decision trees and tables required to make the decisions.
• The hyper link will also allow the user to carry out “what if” analysis with the decisioning knowledge. This allows the user to understand how available options narrow down, as more attributes of the situation become known.
• An assessment can be made of how well the student has acquired the decision making skills by going through a list of situation scenarios and comparing the decisions of the student with that of the knowledge base.
• Support for Natural Language Processing to extract attribute values from text. This capability allows for the automatic classification / categorisation of instruction documents and memos. This allows for the automatic maintenance of a dynamic list of documents and memos (content) without the need to modify the organisation of the concept maps.

Environment & Architecture

• XpertRule eLearning consists of an environment for authoring / developing the teaching / training courses and an engine for running the courses.
• The development environment allows multiple content authors to work together on developing a “Project Course” over a local area network. The “Project Course” is stored on a database (SQL server, Oracle or Sybase) on a server with the authors working over a network.
• The “runtime engine” runs as a COM server delivering the Distance Learning content to students running web browsers over the Internet or Intranet. The XpertRule runtime engine generates the graphical training content as HTML for running within web browsers.
• The runtime engine is fully SCORM compliant and the generated content can be used within any Learning Management System