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Research Groups

e-Learning

Schooling and learning have long been regarded as the primary means by which societies evolve. In fact, there are underlying assumptions within our country's political circles that lifelong learning is paramount for Canada and Canadians to thrive in emerging and future economies.

Current Projects
	"Sifter"
	eduSourceCanada (DLORN)
	OLDaily E-Learning Newsletter
	PEGGAsus

In Canada, funding resources are mostly directed towards the "education" (i.e. "formal education" as opposed to the "result of learning" or the "field of study") and "training" domains, while holistically, R&D activities for "learning" are not adequately targeted. In generic terms, one could consider that "education" targets the building or enhancement of knowledge potential (learning to learn) and "training" targets the building or enhancement of skills and competencies. But "learning" is much wider and occurs within every facet of human activity.

The e-Learning Research Group's work addresses these multiple aspects of learning with activities falling within two main categories (broadly stated, e-Learning is about adapting technologies to enhance learning outcomes):

the development of technologies to more efficiently produce and manage learning resources (this is mostly an industry alignment: technologies to reduce development time for creating "learning resources") and
the development of technologies adapted to the learner's cognitive and social behaviours to enable more efficient means of learning (this is more closely aligned with academic and learner-specific settings: technologies and resources to enhance learning outcomes).

Within the first category, the Group's activities and competencies revolve around learning objects, repositories, specifications and standards for meta-data, quality metrics and evaluation, workflow and process enhancements, digital rights management, interoperability of learning resources / systems, learning resource management for enhanced discoverability / retrieval and automation processes.

In the second category, the Group's focus revolves around human aspects to knowledge building through the development of technologies to support evolving social paradigms (for instance, transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge through social networking shifts and technologies). This can involve building the shortest learning paths for learners to change knowledge states while adapting the learning experience to learner needs, preferences and patterns. Means used to enable such an approach include collaborative filtering, knowledge sharing / communities / mapping, user profiling for learning environment adaptation, collaboration tools / technologies and gaming / simulations for learning.

Learning is not just about information gathering, but also about filtering, contextualizing, analyzing and internalizing. Historically, technological frameworks have failed to properly address this (modelling themselves after traditional educational frameworks), so future activities of the Group and its partners will focus on the development of technological frameworks to enable new and emerging "learning paradigms."

Additional Information

Research Contact

Dr. Andrew Reddick
Program Manager
Health Initiative
NRC Institute for Information Technology
46 Dineen Drive
Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4
Telephone: +1 (506) 444-0540
Fax: +1 (506) 452-3859
E-mail: Andrew Reddick

Business Contact

Georges Corriveau
Business Development Officer
Business Development Office, New Brunswick
NRC Institute for Information Technology
55 Crowley Farm Road, Suite 1100-C, Scientific Park
Moncton, NB E1A 7R1
Telephone: +1 (506) 861-0954
Fax: +1 (506) 851-3630
E-mail: Georges.Corriveau@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca