Technologies for discovery based learning

The digitization of learning content is rapidly changing the way that universities educate their students and creating opportunities for establishing lifelong relationships with former students. Prior efforts in e-learning focused on the production, capture and distribution of content. The next phase will focus on the generation of student learning experiences so that they can more easily organize, analyze, share, and discuss their insights, experiments, and results in a more effective manner. There are many solutions available for each of the above technologies, however there is currently a lack of easy-to-use and seamless automation that supports collective knowledge construction by the learners. We describe a prototype learning environment based on the automation of the analysis and indexing of digital content, the harvesting of pedagogical information from lectures and textbooks, and the personalized generation of learning experiences.