Flexible and exploratory learning by polyscopic topic maps

Flexible and active education calls for a comprehensive restructuring of the traditional university course format. Such restructuring can be done in a natural and coherent way by implementing topic maps in e-learning. In this paper we describe polyscopic topic maps, an information structuring method which is being developed by the authors, a university course model called Flexplearn which is based on this approach, and a prototype Flexplearn course where our model is currently being implemented, used and tested. We also describe BrainBank learning, a topic map-driven application, for learning of concepts and concept relations that we are implementing with Flexplearn.