Educational Technology, Business and Community Scenarios

Educational technology empowers educational systems, businesses, organizations and communities. Technology can provide users with task-based content, advancing productivity, as well as with information in response to their questions, to refresh their knowledge or to facilitate on-the-job training.

There is a cross-fertilization between business and e-participation scenarios. Software tools and features for organizational communication, organizational learning, knowledge management and on-the-job training are of use for e-participation scenarios. Businesses and enterprises are interested in training new employees and providing on-the-job training to all employees. In city-scale e-participation scenarios, new participants arrive regularly and all participants can find opportunities to learn amidst the various, dynamic, tasks and discussions of participatory democracy.

Educational technology tasks pertinent to e-participation include: (1) the instructional design of training programs pertaining to participatory democracy and to city governance, (2) facilitating the authoring of user-generated learning objects, (3) advancing learning objects and learning object metadata, (4) advancing the indexing, search and retrieval of learning objects and the federated search of learning objects, (5) advancing generative learning objects, case-based reasoning and machine learning.

A recent office software feature is that of “insights” or “smart lookup”. Expanding upon such features, computational linguistics algorithms upon documents or multimedia can produce varieties of metadata (i.e. about lexemes, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or overlapping regions or selections). Such metadata, with software such as Office Graph or other task-based contexts, can facilitate the utilization of expanded search API’s, including those of desktop search, search engines and federated search, to increase the quality of search results and to provide search results that include learning objects.

Users can schedule the utilization of learning objects conveniently from task-based contexts with interoperable calendar, scheduling and tasks applications.

Such technology advancements empower educational systems, businesses, organizations and communities. Such technology advancements scale to facilitate the performance of intelligent tutoring systems, digital personal assistants and digital group assistants in task-based mixed-initiative dialogues with users, in response to their questions, to refresh their knowledge or to facilitate on-the-job training.