Navigational Support in Lifelong Learning: Enhancing Effectiveness through Indirect Social Navigation

Abstract

Efficient and effective lifelong learning requires that learners can make well informed choices from the vast amount of learning opportunities available. Drawing on principles of self-organisation and indirect social navigation this paper suggests to help learners find their way by analysing choices made by learners who went before and feeding this information back as advice to present learners. It briefly explains why such an advice is expected to enhance both effectiveness and efficiency of the learning process. A tool developed to deploy indirect social navigation through collaborative filtering is described as well as the tests performed in a controlled experiment. Positive effects were found on effectiveness (progress and completion rates) though not on efficiency (time taken to complete and learners’evaluation of navigational choices made). Though measured on a five point scale, satisfaction over navigational choices appeared to be dichotomous: certainty about the fact that different navigational choices would not have led to better understanding on the one hand and doubts in this respect on the other hand. Additional exploration of learning tracks was performed in order to acquire further knowledge concerning the relation between navigational choices and satisfaction or certainty regarding these choices. The combined results from testing the tool and further exploration of the relation between navigational choices and perceived efficiency of navigational choices, indicate that the tool is a promising start to enhancing effectiveness in learning networks through deployment of self-organisation and indirect social navigation - and one that might be fruitfully extended by incorporating learners’ evaluations of navigational choices to enhance efficiency