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Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 77

the model are learning activities focused on the process of learning.
Learning activities are dynamically configured into sessions, modules,
and courses. In Greenfield parlance, “activities” include discussions,
computer-based animations and simulations, mini-lectures, cooperative
problem-solving exercises, and so forth—in other words, activities that
address the “action” of learning. “Sessions” are groups of activities.
Greenfield does not define a time frame for sessions. They are simply
convenient groupings of activities. “Modules” are concept-frame pack-
ages of learning. A module includes one or more sessions.
The Greenfield course Engineering Economics, for example, in-
cludes Depreciation Accounting (a module), which includes Deprecia-
tion Methodologies and Income Tax Impact (sessions). Income Tax Im-
pact Consequences is an interactive e-learning activity in the Income
Tax Impact session.
We had an important reason for developing this hierarchical struc-
ture, namely, that most faculty members want to structure their own
courses. Although teachers may be interested in borrowing some “neat”
learning activities, they want to package learning in their own unique
ways. Thus, each learning activity is an individual entity. Using a meth-
odology that is becoming more common each day, we define the struc-
ture of the learning activity, describe its content using XML, and dis-
play the activity on a web page using XSL templates (Figure 4).
Links up the hierarchy are constructed differently. If a course is
shared, the uplinks are displayed on a tool bar. The content of the tool
bar is a property of the assembled course and depends upon the position
of the learner in the hierarchy. For a user currently accessing an activity,
the tool bar would look as depicted in Figure 3. Courses contain links to
modules that are included in their content. If the user is at the session
level, the tool bar would show Course>>Module. A module contains
links to sessions, are a part of the module content.
Objectives are included in the definition of learning objects. Objec-
tives are defined at the course level (terminal objectives) and at the mod-
ule and session levels (enabling objectives—objectives that support the

FIGURE 4 Implementing the Greenfield LOM structure.

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