Integration of a Concept Map Generator and a Knowledge-Portal-Based E-learning System

Knowledge management (KM) is the research field aimed to create, organize, and store explicit knowledge for easy access and manipulation, whereas e-learning is concerned with delivering a suite of knowledge contents to a group of learners via the Internet. Since e-learning techniques have grown quickly nowadays to complement the conventional learning system, integration of KM and e-learning has been a tendency to improve the creation, organization, and delivery of a learner-oriented knowledge management system. Particularly, knowledge portal systems are usually efficient vehicles to realize this integration for we can create new content types on the portal sites to serve e-learning purpose. Nevertheless, a knowledge portal site allows the members to create and share their knowledge objects; implying that the website containing group knowledge grows itself unlimitedly and unexpectedly. To display the sitemap of a knowledge portal and observe the concept map of group knowledge, we have developed a visualization tool referred to as the Site-And-Concept (SAC) map generator. In this paper, we apply this map generator on a knowledge-portal-based e-learning system. Users can convert the generated concept maps into SCORM-compliant course packages with sequencing and navigation supports. They can further edit the learning content and share it to peer learners, and thus establish a collaborative learning environment.