The ASTEP distributed framework for teaching and learning

Abstract

ASTEP (Advanced Software for Teaching and Evaluation of Processes) is an Educational Multimedia project supported by the European Commission and promoted by a mixed industry / academia consortium that includes companies and educational institutions from five European countries. The ASTEP mission is twofold: i) to deliver high-quality multimedia training materials to trainees in process-based industries, initially the semiconductor industry, within a collaborative, task-centric, communication-based environment; ii) to use that environment to support industrial and academic trainers in the authoring and redevelopment of those training materials. In order to achieve these objectives, the ASTEP project has under development a framework that comprises four main components: i) a model for learning; ii) an instructional design approach; iii) the support technology and iv) the framework technology itself. This overall framework defines four main layers from the users point of view, that enable them access to a variety of resources, ranging from his immediate vicinity to the wider domain expertise. The framework is task-centric, in the sense of assuming that every action taken by the users are in response to learning tasks that make explicit the course knowledge and identify what progress that took place toward an identified learning outcome. In order to accommodate different training backgrounds, all courseware comprises a multi-layer information structure, where the level of detail depends on the users previous expertise level. The proposed paper will concentrate on the framework proposed by this project and describe the conclusions of trial courses organised with the objective of assessing its training effectiveness.