A meta-cognitive tool for courseware development, maintenance, and reuse

Novak and Iuli [Novak, J. D. & Iuli, R. J. (1991). The use of meta-cognitive tools to facilitate knowledge production. In A paper presented at the fourth Florida AI research symposium (FLAIRS ’91), Pensacola Beach, FL, May, 1991.] discuss the use of Concept Maps as meta-cognitive tools that help people to think about thinking. This work describes a network-enabled meta-cognitive tool based upon extensions to Concept Maps that can be used to help course designers visualize and plan course organizations. This tool permits the user to create a novel type of course description based on the idea of an advance organizer. Course arrangements created by this method do not have the arbitrary linear sequences of topics typically found in traditional courses at the college level. The tool is part of an environment that is designed to foster meaningful learning and reuse of course design and instructional content. This paper presents a description of this software tool, an approach to the creation of a course depiction from a Concept Map, an example of a course that was developed iteratively using the tool, and a discussion of the ways that the tool fosters course and content reuse.