How to enable students to select a learning path on their own?

How to enable students to select a learning path on their own?

by Christian Weiss -
Number of replies: 1

I want to show my students a "lession map" and a "knowledge map" to make them know the dependencies of each learning element / knowledge element (what to know before start learning the next element).

By laying out the "city street map of knowledge" it should be possible to let them navigate on there own route - to let them do a fast-forward or a side-seeing trip.

Such a map has a lot of nodes (may be 100+ nodes). Each node can lead you the a set of other nodes (has outgoing edges). Each node can have a lot dependencies (required previous knowledge) / incomming edges. It is essential to hide complexity where ever possible. Visual representation in a similar manner to www.spicynodes.org/ would be very nice.

My lessions and learning objects will be organized by topics within the course. The above map is just an addition content to the course (for oriantation / navigation).

Suggestions for visualisation software?
What do you think about it?

I want to show my students a "lession map" and a "knowledge map" to make them know the dependencies of each learning element / knowledge element (what to know before start learning the next element).

By laying out the "city street map of knowledge" it should be possible to let them navigate on there own route - to let them do a fast-forward or a side-seeing trip.

Such a map has a lot of nodes (may be 100+ nodes). Each node can lead you the a set of other nodes. Each node can have a lot dependencies (required previous knowledge). It is essential to hide complexity where ever possible. Visual representation in a similar manner to www.spicynodes.org/ would be very nice.

My lessions and learning objects will be organized by topics within the course. The above map is just an addition content to the course (for oriantation / navigation).

Suggestions for visualisation software?
What do you think about it?
Do you know how to achieve that navigations schema with moodle?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Christian Weiss

Re: How to enable students to select a learning path on their own?

by Jerome Di Pietro -

I've used CMap Tools for exactly this kind of thing:
http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/

Useful for both curriculum maps (what I think you're calling Knowledge maps) and course maps (your Lesson maps)

See: http://baroquedub.co.uk/e-learning/page_01.php

 

The problem with spicynodes, from what I can see after a quick glance, is that it is flash based, which is problematic for iDevices.

Re. hiding the complexity of a large map, the answer is just to break up your large map into multiple maps that are linked to from a simplified overview. So in my example (http://baroquedub.co.uk/demos/healthinformatics/ci4601/maps2/dr-100/html/latest/dr-100-what-is-disease-00.php) click on the little map icons, then on the link to open a more detailed version of each node.

 

Hope that helps.