Combining Advanced Networked Technology and Pedagogical Methods to Improve Collaborative Distance Learning

Making educational material be available on a network cannot be reduced to merely implementing hypermedia and interactive resources on a server. A pedagogical schema has to be defined to guide students for learning and to provide teachers with guidelines to prepare valuable and upgradeable resources. Components of a learning environment, as well as interactions between students and other roles such as author, tutor and manager, can be deduced from cognitive foundations of learning, such as the constructivist approach. Scripting the way a student will to navigate among information nodes and interact with tools to build his/her own knowledge can be a good way of deducing the features of the graphic interface related to the management of the objects. We defined a typology of pedagogical resources, their data model and their logic of use. We implemented a generic and web-based authoring and publishing platform (called J@LON for Join And Learn On the Net) within an object-oriented and open-source programming environment (called Zope) embedding a content management system (called Plone). Workflow features have been used to mark the progress of students and to trace the life cycle of resources shared by the teaching staff. The platform integrated advanced on line authoring features to create interactive exercises and support live courses diffusion. The platform engine has been generalized to the whole curriculum of medical studies in our faculty; it also supports an international master of risk management in health care and will be extent to all other continuous training diploma.