E-Docent: a tool for the creation of teaching environments with support for educator coordination

Abstract

The following paper describes e-docent, a webbased application for the construction of teaching sites. Edocent is an LMS (Learning Management System). In the same vein as other similar applications, it offers various ways to ease the communication between teachers and students, and also between students, thus trying to enhance the learning experience. However, its main trait is a coordination module. This is a tool for the team of educators who are responsible for a given discipline or set of subjects. It offers support to establish a set of relationships between subjects, thus facilitating a higher degree of cohesion among related matters. This means a shift in perception for the student since he or she is provided (in an automatic and explicit way) with a set of relationships between concrete aspects of various related subjects. Students are shown a holistic view of their studies, beyond the usual teaching materials. Educators can use an automatic search system to help them find points of interest in their own material, thus selecting the most significant. Documents (PDF, DOC, PPT) supplied to the portal by the educator are supplemented with a learning object which contains a set of metadata that describe document contents and point to other related documents.