Education

Learning isn't just about the acquisition of knowledge in the classroom, but the application and transferrence of that knowledge in any setting. Semantica makes it possible to spread relevant knowledge and expertise through the organization.

Often, training course development and delivery mechanisms are static, linear and fail to empower the student. Investment in textbooks and manuals are very difficult to recoup in an online environment. Online corporate training can merely replicate the offline experience.

Until the advent of universal access to computers, higher education had relied on two primary models of instruction: the book and the lecture. These two methodologies make fundamental assumptions about the gathering and transfer of knowledge that have recently been challenged by several phenomena:

• Information Explosion: The increasingly rapid growth of knowledge in many subject areas as well as the rapid emergence of entirely new fields of study.
• The Internet: The speed with which knowledge is shared via the internet and the World Wide Web.
• New Learning Models: Greater understanding of the many ways in which different students learn best, nearly all of which involve active student learning strategies.
• Lifelong, Just-In-Time, and Distance Learning: New demands for learning outside of the traditional classroom setting.

These present many new challenges to traditional instructional methodologies, including:

• Time to Publish: It is increasingly difficult to capture all the knowledge needed for a course and to write and publish a complete textbook, whether with single or multiple authors, before the material is out of date.
• Monster Textbooks: A single linear narrative of sentences, paragraphs, sections and chapters rarely if ever satisfies all variations of courses that use the text.
• Asynchronous Learning: The model of learning in which students gather at a regular time and place to learn an entire body of knowledge simultaneously at the same speed does not support lifelong or distance learners, or those who need nuggets of knowledge as new situations demand them.
• Passive Learning: The model of learning in which students read, or listen to and attempt to absorb, predigested and pre-sequenced knowledge at a standard and uninterrupted delivery speed, does not work well to promote meaningful student understanding.

The Semantica knowledge productivity software suite is designed to answer these challenges and build on the phenomena that caused them. Semantica helps harness the explosion of information available through the Internet and reduces the time to publish by helping instructors or authors quickly organize the bits and pieces available into coherent structures. It avoids the linearity of the monster textbook by supporting nonlinear, nonhierarchical structure, thus allowing each reader to move through the portion of the content that interests them, following the paths that satisfy their needs. It adapts to new learning models by encouraging alternative visualizations and by supporting visual presentations of knowledge. It encourages active learning by providing students an external manipulable representation of the knowledge with which they can become actively engaged. It supports synchronous and asynchronous learning in both traditional classrooms and in lifelong, just in time, and distance learning by supporting collaborative knowledge sharing and visualization in both local and networked environments.

The Semantica platform supports advanced knowledge capture, management and transfer in the education market. Semantic Research is interested in partnering with market leading solutions providers to create specific solutions for their markets that are based on the Semantica architecture and components. If you are interested in joining the Semantica Partners program, please contact us.