The Learning Federation


	Instructional Design: Using Games and Simulations in Learning Discovering how people learn, how experts organize information, and the skills of effective learners.

	Question Generation and Answer Systems How to take advantage of the benefits offered by emerging technologies to facilitate inquiry and build profiles of learner’s interests, capabilities and learning styles.

	Learner Modeling and Assessment What learner characteristics to measure, when to measure and how to use the information.

	Building Simulations and Exploration Environments How to build complex virtual environments that accurately reflect current understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics that permit exploration-based pedagogy

	Integration Tools for Building and Maintaining Advanced Learning Systems A plan to develop engineering strategies for using learning system tools to build learning systems.

As specifications and standards have been developed to support web-based system directed learning systems, the means for creating interoperable and robust instructional content have emerged. However, these specifications have defined a technically complex infrastructure that is unfriendly to instructional designers. Designers should be able to focus entirely on content, the needs of students and instructional theory and not on the mechanics of the software. A variety of authoring and integration tools are needed to make it easy to identify software resources and to combine these resources into a functioning system.

This component roadmap provides:

An assessment of the R&D needs
Identification of key research questions and technical requirements
A detailed chronology of R&D activities over the next 3-10 years
Long-term goals and shorter-term benchmarks

Download the complete Integration Tools for Building and Maintaining Advanced Learning Systems component roadmap to learn more about the detailed R&D tasks related to these research questions.