Abstract:

This paper illustrates a methodology conceived in the context of a Life Long Learning program, aimed in particular at people already employed, busy in their everyday work, that nevertheless need not stopping their learning experience.
One of the major problems here is to capture the attention of the people and engage them into a virtuous learning path.

The proposed method starts from the idea that in a large number of cases you need to consider that:
- traditional teaching approaches, based on the notion of courses that cover a ‘standard’ set of disciplinary content, do not work;
- the recipients have already a good base of skill and competencies;
- often, they already have a university degree;
- they work in a complex scenario with little time available;
- when studying, they need to see that the content will help in their work.

The proposed methodology starts with the idea that a powerful trigger for a learning episode (we prefer this term as opposed to ‘course’) is a problem that one incurs during her/his (working) activities. Then, the challenge is to present to the actor a coherent, personalised, interlinked set of learning units intended to equip her/him with the knowledge useful to address the problem at hand.

Networked learning takes place in the context of a Networked Learning Ecosystem that has two faces, one is the social media and one is an Educational Knowledge Graph (EKG), composed by Reusable Learning Objects that are interconnected according to a Conceptual Graph. The latter is an ontology that organises, at a conceptual level, the educational content and the human resources with their competences. In this paper we focus on the latter.

An EKG can be traversed in many different ways, along different dimensions. An EKG can be seen organised according to disciplinary clusters and strata. Strata are used to move along the vertical axis, where increasing the depth implies a deeper (more detailed) material of a given topic. Moving horizontally implies the navigation through different topics, where arcs are oriented to indicate a logical dependency (with preparatory topics that precede.) The arcs can be solid, when there is a strong dependency (i.e., you cannot address topic B if you did not understand topic A) or a broken arc in case of ‘soft dependency’, i.e., when topic A is suggested to better (and quicker) understand topic B, but its absence will not prevent the understanding.

A Networked Learning Scheme is a path on the 3D graph traversing a sequence of nodes, with a sequencing that best matches the needs of the learner. Cycles are not excluded, when a given topic needs ot be addressed in a later stage, when the learner understands that the ideas need to be better clarified.

Problem-driven Learning:
The Networked Learning Experience can be initiated in any moment, accessing the Networked Learning Ecosystem. It can be motivated by the curiosity, for instance, or by the working needs, e.g., when s/he encounters a problem while working.

A problem represents a good opportunity for a fruitful learning experience. The Problem-driven Learning Experience starts from a problem and then guides the learner along a path, traversing the NKG, in order for the subject to acquire the knowledge necessary to solve the problem.

Keywords:

Reusable learning objects, networked knowledge, problem-driven learning, knowledge graph.