Abstract:

Unlocking the secrets of learning is an exciting journey that accompanies everyone daily throughout their entire life. Learning describes how individuals acquire, assimilate, and apply knowledge. From our first uncertain steps as toddlers via appropriating social skills to learning a profession, the learning process is key for personal growth, social interaction, professional success, and innovation. To improve the learning process in an academic environment, a Learning Management System (LMS) can be used to arrange learning elements depending on the learners' preferences. Here, the term "learning elements" describes objects with which a learner works for the purpose of education or training. They are the main components in online and offline teaching and learning.

This paper provides a set of learning elements for organizing learning material in online education inside LMSs. First, a initial set comprising nine learning elements was established by a group of five experts from the field of education within research and review process. In a second step, a qualitative survey was designed and implemented as an online questionnaire in LimeSurvey with the focus on the Higher Education Area (HEA). The survey itself asks for the approval of the definitions for the learning elements, for completeness of the set of learning elements and the frequency of use in form of 36 questions. The acceptance of the definitions and the frequency of use for each learning element were indicated on a 5-step Likert scale, while the improvements of the learning element were submitted as free text. 35 participants, consisting of professors, lecturers, and tutors answered the questionnaire completely in the summer term of 2023.

Following these two steps, this paper identifies a set of ten learning elements with proper definitions and their frequency of use. The learning elements include manuscript, summary, quiz, brief overview, learning goal, exercise, collaboration tool, auditory additional material, textual additional material, and visual additional material. The learning element "collaboration tool" was added to the initial set by evaluating the answers to the completeness question of the survey. These findings hold significant potential for a systematic improvement of the learning process in online education and will be integrated into the context of the HASKI project, which aims to generate personalized learning paths using various algorithms.

Keywords:

Learning elements, Learning Management System (LMS), learning objects, questionnaire, Higher Education Area (HEA), content organization.