Navigational support in lifelong learning: Enhancing effectiveness through indirect social navigation

Efficient and effective lifelong learning requires that learners can make well informed choices from a vast amount of learning opportunities. This paper suggests helping learners find their way drawing on principles of self-organisation and indirect social navigation; by analysing choices made by learners who went before and feeding this information back as advice to present learners. The paper describes results from testing a tool, developed to offer indirect social navigation through collaborative filtering, in a controlled experiment. Positive effects were found on effectiveness (progress and completion rates) though not on efficiency (time taken to complete and learners’ perception of learning track efficiency). Learners in the experimental group were not faster at completing all available units of learning nor did they evaluate learning track efficiency more positively. Responses to the question evaluating learning track efficiency, measured on a five point scale, seemed to indicate a dichotomy rather than an ordinal scale. Learners stated either that studying the units of learning in a different order might have led to increased understanding of the content or that a different order would not have led to greater efficiency. They hardly ever felt sure that a different order would’ve led to a better understanding. Analysing this dichotomy in relation to learning track characteristics and learners’ background characteristics by means of the decision tree induction data mining technique, revealed that a small subset of navigational choices performed well in discriminating between a positive evaluation on one hand and doubts regarding the efficiency of the learning track on the other hand. These results suggest that positive effects for effectiveness might be fruitfully extended by positive effects for efficiency, by using learners’ overall evaluations of learning tracks to derive decision rules to be incorporated into the advice.