III. NAVIGATIONAL EXTENSIONS OF THE CHOSEN
ELEARNING PLATFORM
The authors’ recent efforts on extending Moodle’s
Lesson module resulted in eLessons having useful ability to
reference parts of other eLessons within the course, as well
as extended jumps from one learning object (LO) to the other
depending on student’s current and previous activity. In
accordance to that, basic LO component can be seen as a
hypertext asset with (not necessarily all of the) following
features:
• HTML asset can contain a question.
• Returning back to the same asset is possible and
often used after the wrong answer.
• Continuation of the learning path towards another
asset is feasible in any part of the course (depending
on the answer).
• Redirection from the contents of the LO to another
LO is also achievable in any part of the course (any
eLesson within the course).
• Reminders of the contents of any other LO within
the course can be created within any HTML asset.
LOs, as self-standing pieces of instructional content that
meet certain learning objectives, can be arbitrary combined
into aggregations while planning eLessons. For these
purposes we recommend using the best practice guide issued
by Carnegie Mellon University [3]. It provides instructional
designers with guidelines for identifying and designing LOs,
structuring tests, navigating, sequencing and packaging the
content.
The aforesaid and other extensions, like conditional
jumps and possibility to include carefully structured pre-
/post-tests in eLessons, were thus necessary for tracing
student progression, as well as connecting and combining
LOs according to the CMU templates. Possibilities of their
use in hypothetical eLessons are explored through lesson
structures presented further in this paper (Fig. 1 and 2).
A. Interconnection between LOs
One of the most useful newly developed features is the
possibility to directly connect any part of one asset’s
contents to another asset [11]. There are two functionalities
of this extension: redirection of learners’ paths to other parts
of eContent and simple reminders.
B. Extended jumps
Further updates of the previously suggested extension led
to the extended choice of target lesson pages. Now all pages
from eLessons belonging to the current eCourse are available
as target pages at any time and from any LO [11].