LOOKING BEYOND E-LEARNING: THE IMPACT OF COGNITIVE COMPUTING

In the past years, the technology-enhanced learning (TEL) field has been characterized by continuous innovation, mostly devoted to implementing newly emerged technologies inside the different facets of teaching and learning tasks. What is happening now is something different, and is mainly related to exponential learning, a process of exponential growth of training demand. In fact, new knowledge and skills must be delivered at a speed never seen before (see, e.g., Industry 4.0 as well as other European Community programs, cognitive managers, cognitive architecture engineers, cognitive system programming, etc.). The authors believe that this paradigm must be extended, shifting from classrooms to communities, speaking of men and machines, rather than men or machines, enhancing humans’ faculties and assisting them in the transformation of skills. This will happen through the definition, design, and use of novel cognitive services that can be implemented in the next generation of TEL platforms, where big data about training and learning are acquired and historicized, on top of which we foresee the application of a new set of cognitive services. To achieve such results, we will be forced to respect two fundamental constraints: time and content, with contents that will have to be ready within the time learners, will need them. Probably the services will be profiled for different users’ levels, such as learning professional and learning business consumer. We are on a turning point of training processes, a very challenging and important moment in which cognitive approaches will transform everything, and e-learning processes and platforms are not excluded. As are not excluded interfaces that will be completely different from those we use because we will talk with the machines by asking questions whose answer will result from a very advanced decision-making process but with very low time constraints. The paper presents the general vision of authors about this new scenario and some preliminary applications to a virtual community platform where a big data-enabled architecture and some prototypes of cognitive services are under experimentation.