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Prompts to Create Learning Graphs

Step 1: Create a Rough Course Description

The first step in creating an intelligent textbook is to begin with a course description as though it might appear in a course catalog. The course description should contain:

  1. The audience for the course
  2. Any prerequisites for the course including things like keyboarding skills, internet access
  3. The subject, topics and learning objectives of the course
  4. The outcomes stated in the form "After this course the student will be able to..."

Step 2: Generate a Bloom Taxonomy Course Description

After you have a rough course description, we want to generate a course description that is consistent with the 2001 Bloom taxonomy. This taxonomy breaks up the course description into six levels from lowest to highest.

  • Remember - Retrieving relevant knowledge from long-term memory, including recognizing and recalling basic concepts, facts, and terminology. In an intelligent textbook, this might involve basic definitions and concept explanations. Our textbooks all should have a glossary of terms with ISO-11179 concept definitions.
  • Understand - Constructing meaning from instructional messages, including interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining. This is where links in learning graphs can first become valuable for demonstrating concept relationships.
  • Apply - Carrying out or using procedures in given situations, including executing and implementing learned material in new contexts. Your collection of MicroSims appears particularly strong in supporting this level through interactive demonstrations.
  • Analyze - Breaking material into constituent parts and determining how parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose. This includes differentiating, organizing, and attributing knowledge.
  • Evaluate - Making judgments based on criteria and standards, including checking and critiquing. Your learning graphs can help students understand how concepts interconnect at this level.
  • Create - Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into new patterns or structures. This highest level is where students might modify or create their own MicroSims.

You can remember these six levels by using the term RUAAEC (pronounced "roo-eck").

Concept Enumeration