A distance ecological model for individual and collaborative-learning support

With the rapid development of information technology (IT) and the Internet spread, it is widely accepted that computer and information communication literacy has become extremely important, and will play a major part in everyone’s lives in the future. Under the umbrella of life-long education, many people from many parts of the social environment will need to be trained and learn about IT. We have started building a framework for such people, as a distance ecological model for self/ collaborative learning support. We call our system RAPSODY: Remote and AdaPtive educational System Offering a DYnamic communicative environment. To show the functionality of our general framework, we instantiated it in the form of a distance learning environment for teacher training. The purpose of this study direction is to propose and develop a distance educational model, as a school-based curriculum development and training-system. In this environment, a teacher can learn via an Internet-based self-training system about subject contents, modern teaching know-how, and students’ learning activities evaluation methods, about the new subject called "Information". This paper describes the structure, functions and mechanism of our distance educational model, in order to realize the above-mentioned goal, and then discuss the educational meaning of this model in consideration of the new learning ecology, which is based on multi-modality and new learning situations and forms, and we perform some tests and evaluation. Moreover, we show an extension of our RAPSODY framework, RAPSODY-EXT, which also embraces collaboration in remote learning environments.