Learning Activities in a Virtual Campus

Abstract

The international standardization process has already resulted in the production of a draft about Learning Object Metadata (LOM), which provides a means to describe learning resources. This effort makes retrieval of learning resources easier and encourages interoperability and reusability of educational components. The work presented in this chapter has been done in an industrial context in which the interoperability with other online training platforms was a major issue. An implementation of this emerging standard has been successfully conducted. Several weak points of this standard are explained after a global presentation of the services offered by the platform. Nevertheless, the most attractive points of this online training platform are not restricted to the pedagogical resource delivery or management but are more centered on the learning activities support. In previous educational projects, the system designed at Trigone Laboratory mainly encouraged a collaborative way of learning using asynchronous communication channels; this system strongly structured the conversation to help the users coordinate their actions. In systems we are currently working on, this “on-the-fly coordination” is balanced by offering a structured context of work in terms of scheduling learning activities. This chapter shows the complementary aspects offered by structuring learning objects on one hand and by structuring the organization of the user’s work on the other hand.