ADVANCED CONTENT DESIGN FOR MORE EFFICIENT E-LEARNING

The Knowledge Society made the concept of lifelong learning a continuous objective, necessity and challenge driving changes in the way we learn. Today lifelong learning became an essential "way of life" for many individuals permanently engaged in personal self-development by seeking new ways of extending their knowledge and skills. For them lifelong learning is a tool for better and faster professional development thus building a sustainable career. In itself, lifelong learning sets new requirements to learning - to be faster, cheaper and better. But to be more efficient lifelong learning needs new concepts, approaches, integrated solutions and flexible tools that can be easily adapted to various informal training needs and models. Obviously today there is a critical need of significantly improved concepts and methodologies to guide a new instructional design and development of more efficient e-learning/e-training processes. The paper describes a new instructional design and its implementation into lifelong learning and vocational education and training. Course development and learning process management methodology based on Lean principles makes e-learning more efficient by: -shifting from the "passive" book paradigm to a new "active" e-learning content structure and information workflow conveying the knowledge, -integrating measurement and control elements into the digital content workflow and thus improve the efficiency of the whole e-learning process and its management, -designing knowledge maps by dynamically hyper linking "active" knowledge and learning objects on them and charting shortest learning paths. -The major advantage of the proposed innovative methodology is that the well performed self-directed autonomous learners get the exact required outcomes (=knowledge) with no waste of time (=improved efficiency). The presented methodology is well suited to all learning areas, but it has clear advantages in learning applications with precisely predefined learning goals (the exact knowledge and skills to be acquired at the end of the course). From this point of view, the paper presents the way of integration of this methodology into learning/training process oriented on the improving knowledge in the area of renewable energies.