Facilitating constructivist learning through managing learning processes

Nowadays online learning has been recognized as an important alternative to conventional classroom learning. However many cur-rent online instructional systems merely supply course materials for learners without providing effective services to support learners to construct knowledge. Learners only passively receive information from the presented materials. They have not been engaged in actively constructing meaningful understandings of the study theme by using a constructivist method. This work tries, through managing learners' learning processes, to actively assist them to construct knowledge in a constructivist way. In this paper, the online learning process is structured and the services to support knowledge construction in the process are defined. The database for providing information to implement the services is exploited, including a specification language to describe the learning activities, the major components and their roles to supply the services. The approaches to implementing these services are respectively studied.