Knowledge Organization

The first step in any kind of education is to prepare a teaching program. The teaching program should satisfy all the needs of the user. In order to do this, the teaching program should be properly organized and it should be prepared in association with subject specialists. These two principles must be applied to all teaching programs; the age or the stature of the target user base is irrevelant.

The most important point in the production of computer-supported education material is the knowledge organization and its presentation. The knowledge should be divided into educationally sound pieces and these pieces should be fed to the user. In a classical sense, this is the organization we commonly see in the contents section of books. In this organization scheme, divisions are followed by subdivisions. Generally, books name the largest divisions as units . Units are divided into topics and topics may be further divided into subtopics.

While studying with the computer-supported education material, the user may form an intuitive analogy between the classroom blackboard and the computer screen. Similar to the blackboard in classical classrooms, the knowledge presented in a single screen should be structurally complete and the information density the screen contains should allow the user to learn it by heart. We refer to a single screen of such knowledge as a chunk .

Knowledge can be organized by two methods through the use of concept maps. The first method is the schematic display; in which large concepts are divided into smaller concepts and the relation between the two are shown. The second method is to organize knowledge in a series of small chunks and build the larger concepts using these chunks.

Both of these two methods are important tools that can be used while preparing computer-supported education material. Care must be taken not to alienate the user at this point. The topic map the user will see on the screen should not be different from the topic map he is used to.