ENHANCING E-LEARNING THROUGH USING STUDENTS' VIRTUAL CLONES

Accounting for learned experiences, traditional e-learning keeps track of any progress someone makes, just by building "a knowledge log" against given tests. It is a static perspective, postevent generated, also assuming a post-factum procedure for someone's knowledge ranking. Since we strongly believe that learning is a subject-specific process, knowledge transfer being qualified by the actual learner's background, our proposed approach is copiously relying on generating a virtual "mental" clone for each student [2]. By comparing the actual student tests' results with his/her clone's ones, in case significant differences are detected, student's learning procedure should be improved. In addition, new concepts could be easily embedded within the virtual clone, allowing an a priori binding of future lessons to the actual student. Thus, the ultimate goals of the enhanced e-learning (ee-learning) paradigm, based on individual assessment of the student-clone pair's learning progress, will be the development of (1) student-dedicated learning method(s) and (2) student-tailored knowledge transfer. In our view, understanding is, above all, a continuous interpretation over the evolutionary logical forms (i.e. dynamic notions) students should learn. Students' apprehended logical forms, resulted from a combined perception - thinking approach, are solidified into concepts. However, not all students are congenial to all notions. In fact, any notion is a subjective-rationale form (it is subjective since it is dependent on the cognizant subject, and it is rationale since it cannot be grasped by senses); thus, a learned notion is the generalized (abstract) logical form representing (a) the essence (all abstract attributes) and (b) the quiddity (proximate genus, specific differences and proper) of the apprehended notion. Our goal is to mimic the cognitive adequacy specific for the student's learned notions to the acquired notions by the student's clone. Specifically, for each student, a virtual clone is to be generated, while this clone should acquire the supposedly learned notions by the student. Thus a virtual cognitive space, a repository of each clone's acquired notions, is built with the intended purpose to become a testing and experimenting territory for: (i) new and specific knowledge to be transfer to the student, (ii) new and specific learning methods to be applied to the student, and NO predicting student's mental evolution. In addition, since the cognition 1-.31 is carried out only through concepts (i.e. by conceptualizing the facts) and since this (the cognition) is a multi-stage process, the introduction of some productive logical forms, associated to the clone's conceptualization process, becomes necessary.