Goal Oriented Learning Environments

Goal Oriented Learning Environments

E-learning encompasses many things to many people. Elliot Massie, a leading e-learning guru, states that "Online learning is not about taking a course and putting it on desktop. It encompasses "Combination of learning services and technology to provide high value integrated learning anytime and anyplace". GOLEª aims to create a virtual learning simulator that is capable of customizing the pedagogy to the learners learning style. To properly design learn by doing scenarios, the learning environment must balance the learning objectives with authenticity. The key is to build a realistic environment which is complex enough to promote expectation failure and robust enough to support the learner at that point. Two of the major learning objectives for a goal oriented learning environment are the application of facts and building specific skills. The purpose of this research was to design, develop, implement and assess a Goal Oriented Learning Environment (GOLE) into the Civil and Environmental Engineering curriculum at Lehigh University. Also to design, develop, implement, and assess Internet-based instructional systems into the CEE curriculum. To achieve these objectives, a GOLE was implemented into two courses that were used as case studies in this research. These case studies describe the instructional design method utilized and the assessment involved to evaluate the courses. The instructional design method utilized nine steps: Discuss, Determine, Decide, Design, Develop, Implement, Assessment, Evaluation and Evolve. The designing of GOLE focused on: content, delivery platform, character development and story line. In order to assess and evaluate the GOLE, a series of five evaluations were created in order perform the analysis: skill matrix, course, performance, website evaluations and the DISC profile. The data was then analyzed to determine what parts of the course were effective.

Goal-driven Learning

Brings together a diversity of research on goal-driven learning to establish a broad, interdisciplinary framework that describes the goal-driven learning process. In cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and education, a growing body of research supports the view that the learning process is strongly influenced by the learner's goals. The fundamental tenet of goal-driven learning is that learning is largely an active and strategic process in which the learner, human or machine, attempts to identify and satisfy its information needs in the context of its tasks and goals, its prior knowledge, its capabilities, and environmental opportunities for learning. This book brings together a diversity of research on goal-driven learning to establish a broad, interdisciplinary framework that describes the goal-driven learning process. It collects and solidifies existing results on this important issue in machine and human learning and presents a theoretical framework for future investigations. The book opens with an an overview of goal-driven learning research and computational and cognitive models of the goal-driven learning process. This introduction is followed by a collection of fourteen recent research articles addressing fundamental issues of the field, including psychological and functional arguments for modeling learning as a deliberative, planful process; experimental evaluation of the benefits of utility-based analysis to guide decisions about what to learn; case studies of computational models in which learning is driven by reasoning about learning goals; psychological evidence for human goal-driven learning; and the ramifications of goal-driven learning in educational contexts. The second part of the book presents six position papers reflecting ongoing research and current issues in goal-driven learning. Issues discussed include methods for pursuing psychological studies of goal-driven learning, frameworks for the design of active and multistrategy learning systems, and methods for selecting and balancing the goals that drive learning. A Bradford Book

Using Goal Orientation to Develop Customized Learning Environments