Delivery strategies

The information delivery aspect of a learning or {tag knowledge management} system can be characterized by considering the relationship between knowledge providers and learners/readers. The relationship between these two actors can be defined in three categories:

The One-to-Many strategy (p. e.g. ex-cathedra courses) can be enriched by videos, animations or other forms of presentation support. Feedback systems (classroom voting systems) allow the instructor to have an immediate return on her/his work.

Moreover live broadcasts or archived broadcasts of courses via synchronous (p. e.g. web conferencing) or asynchronous communication tools (differed diffusion of videos) broaden the public audience. This is due to a diffusion dissociated from time and/or space. Nevertheless, in this case the relation between actors remains "traditional" and based on the passive transmission of knowledge.

The Many-to-Many strategy profits from new tools designed to improve the organization and the follow-up of information, and its delivery to the target public. From our point of view infinite-to-One (i2Me™) strategy takes more advantage of the possibilities offered by new technologies. The variety of information sources, the short duration of knowledge’s life, the need for the refreshing and updating of professional knowledge as well as the great range of people who desire training, seem to speak in favour of an infinite-to-One (i2Me™) approach. However, very few eLearning systems have chosen this approach alone. Most of Knowledge Management Systems and Learning Management Systems are using a classical "One-to-many" method. One of the main purposes of i2Me™ delivery engine is, to a certain extent, to solve problems linked to the organization, to cooperate on an expert network and to offer a highly personalized broadcasting system which takes into account the targets and knowledge of each learner or reader.

To better understand this difference we can compare the classical approach using the new technologies with the infinite-to-One (i2Me™) approach, which is proposed by SemanTech SA .

Taking the classical approach, information is organized according to a sequential scheme, which is pre-defined by the instructor(s). This scheme is the same for all learners. Hyperlinks, whenever there are any, do not permit an exit from the scheme established by the instructor: When a learner clicks on a hyperlink text, the system opens a document which is always the same for all the learners. The individual way of learning is based only on the choice each learner has, to click or not, on a particular link. This navigation method, which is well known by web users, has been widely exploited by classical training systems, much before the web came out. These systems have gone even further in the individualization, by proposing a reorganization of the navigation based on self-evaluation of test results.

With i2Me™ delivery engine, we have gone even further by associating dynamic hyperlinks navigation, Internet network and training documents databases (learning objects database).

i2Me™ delivery engine allows each learner to reach his/her learning objective using a network of concepts delivered and described by various content providers. i2Me™ delivery engine allows:

This is important to notice that content providers can deliver part of content in the system without developing complete modules. Using the prerequisites/related topics information, each document becomes part of the concept network, contains dynamic hyperlinks and will be delivered to the right user within a module generated on-the-fly. These modules constitute the shortest way for a learner/reader to reach his/her objectives. This pathway will cross all necessary prerequisites for understanding the requested topic. Using information collected during the self-evaluation, the system will select only prerequisites, which are not yet mastered by the user.