Concept Maps: Making Learning Meaningful Proc. of Fourth Int. Conference on Concept Mapping J.Sánchez, A.J.Cañas, J.D.Novak, Eds. Viña del Mar, Chile, 2010 ITINERARIES: CAPTURING INSTRUCTORS’ EXPERIENCE USING CONCEPT MAPS AS LEARNING OBJECT ORGANIZERS Alberto J. Cañas & Joseph D. Novak Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), USA www.ihmc.us Abstract. An Itinerary is a concept map that serves as a guide for students on how to study or learn a particular topic. By its concept map structure, the Itinerary provides alternatives for the learner to choose how to proceed through the activities provided. An Itinerary doesn’t describe the topic, it recommends how the topic can be studied, and is therefore different from a traditional descriptive concept map. Itineraries provide a level of abstraction that is more manageable by Instructors when organizing online courses than Learning Object and their repositories, and provide inherently the experience of the Instructors that create them, facilitating reusability. Itineraries were used as the mean to organize and present content for Cmappers.Learn, a site open for anybody interested in learning about concept mapping and its uses. 1 Introduction Distance, eLearning, and online learning have come to be accepted as means by which students can obtain quality education. Until recently registering for an online course was a last resort, used only when the lecture-based course was not an option, or as a way to take elective courses that are not part of the core curriculum. This has changed as online courses have evolved, new technologies are available to support the process, and students are much more comfortable with these new technologies. Mixed mode courses, in which some activities are carried out online, are also popular. At the Techonomy Conference held in early August 2010 in Lake Tahoe, Bill Gates noted that “Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university” (Siegler, 2010). Online courses are usually administered through a LMS (Learning Management System), software for which there are versions available both commercially and as open source, that takes care of the management of the course (e.g. lists of students, grades, etc.) and provides tools such as email, discussions or forums, chats, blogs, testing, and posting of online material. However, most LMS don’t provide much functionality beyond mimicking the brick-and- mortar classroom. In fact their whole structure is based on traditional classroom courses and thus the syllabus is assumed to be sequential, an online equivalent of that of traditional classroom courses. For the professor or instructor, preparing an online course is much more time consuming than a traditional classroom course since it usually requires preparing a lot more material, finding appropriate resources, and organizing them through the LMS. One of the advantages expected from an extensive proliferation of online courses was the reusability of content from other instructors. An instructor preparing a course would take advantage of online content that had been used by others teaching the same topic, simplifying the course preparation task. Taking some pieces from one place, other pieces from another instructor somewhere else, etc., instructors would be able to piece together the content of a course tailored to their needs, reducing the effort required if new content had to be prepared. The idea of an online, digital resource that can be used and re-used to support learning brought about the term Learning Object. 2 Learning Objects and Learning Object Repositories The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one of the leading organizations working on the standardization of Learning Objects (LO), defines a LO as “any entity digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training” (Learning Technology Standards Committee, 2002). Most authors consider the reusability of the LO as being a key characteristic. Daniel Rehak & Robin Mason (2003) define it as “a digitized entity which can be used, reused or referenced during technology supported learning.” A second key characteristic of a LO is its Metadata, descriptive tags that identify the LO, characterize it and makes it “searchable”. A LO’s metadata may include general course descriptive data, language, instructional content (type of resource, such as text, Web page, video, image, etc.), prerequisites, and educational level, among others.