Current eLearning practices rely, rather narrowly, on theories of learning and educational psychology to build platforms for creating sound online instruction. However, with the integration of indexing technologies, most notably, Topic Maps (ISO 13250) into eLearning applications (see Venkatesh et al., 2007, in press), it has become necessary for online instructional designers to take into account theories of cognitive information retrieval to better support the organization of and search for relevant information in a corpus containing learning resources. In this presentation, I provide a description of a case study on the design, development and longitudinal evaluation of a topic map used by 28 graduate learners who took an eLearning course with me between February 2006 and November 2006.

The topic map was built to serve as an index and navigational guide to a repository of 132 graded and annotated essays; these essays were written by 33 students who had already completed my eLearning course between 2002 and 2004. Learners in the course are required to complete six to seven academically-grounded essays over the course of thirteen weeks of instruction. The repository of essays, along with its topic map, provided learners with an opportunity to consult, at their convenience, essays that had already been graded by the instructor, thereby providing them with insight into the assessment criteria as well as inspiration for their own essays. The topic map indexed the essays in the repository by author, grade received (i.e., A+ to C) and subjects covered by the author in the essay (e.g., learning theory, motivation, knowledge management, etc.).

Learners’ use of the topic map was tracked electronically, and performance data were collected over the course of the instruction. Preliminary analysis of the data reveals that learners used the grade index more often at the beginning of the course, and tended to rely on the subjects index as the course wore on. Overall, with the use of the repository, learner performance on the essays steadily improved from one week to the next; there was, in fact, a significant amelioration in the performances of learners who used the repository as compared to those who did not. The learners who benefited the most from the use of the topic map were those who had neither a comprehensive understanding of the writing assignment nor of its’ assessment criteria.

I will demonstrate, during the presentation, some typical use cases of the repository, as well as speculate on how topic map technology can influence the design of future course management systems and learning content management systems.