Why ALE?

ALE is an environment for building web-based action learning communities. Although ALE can be used to build plain old page flippers, its real goal is to support levels of interactivity that aren't even possible in face to face classrooms in view of the practical difficulties of getting there, separating signal from noise, and managing structured interaction throughout the course without automated workflow support.

ALE's goal is not to help technically incompetent teachers put page flipping excuses for "distance education" on the web. Courses are defined, not by HTML files, not even by XHTML files, but by XML files. These are edited with text editors or one of many excellent XML GUI editors. ALE (currently) provides no "easy to use" course composition tools that anyone with a detectable pulse can use to produce excruciatingly boring passive web "content". The goal is producing top-quality web-based courses comparable to classrooms at their best. As we'll see, this requires far more expressiveness than a XHTML editors can possibly provide.

Student to Teacher Interaction

ALE courses achieve this by discarding the paradigm that a course involves a lecturer pouring information into passive vessels called students, where the only true interaction is to check the fill level with a midterm and a final. It does this by simply making the form of interaction called quizzes so natural and so easy for both teachers and students, that both view them as just part of the learning process, not an irrelevant ordeal at the end.

So as a rule, each page of instruction contains built-in quizzes, such as the example essay question below.

This is an example essay question. A typical one might ask the student to paraphrase the information presented above.

ALE treats such forms as if they were blackboards or pieces of paper, where any information the student put in them automatically persists in the ALE database when the student returns to them later. This form doesn't demonstrate this because this feature requires that you be logged in. But the net effect is that the database is populated with answers as students proceed from page to page, where it becomes the basis of the additional features described below.

Interaction involves far more than just marking up handouts in HTML and putting them on a web server, which is only a small improvement on just stapling them to the office door.

Student to Student Interaction

But student-teacher interaction is not the only way students learn in a course. Student-student interaction is often just as important. ALE needn't do anything special for unstructured (point to point) interaction, because this is easily provided with email, listservs, and chat tools. ALE concentrates on making it possible to support structured interaction of the sort students might experience in a classroom role-playing simulation or moderated discussion group.

Faculty to Student Interaction

ALE courses are composed of tasks, which are composed of a sequence of pages, much like this one. As the student reads pages, they respond to questions, and these answers are recorded in the ALE database each time they move to a new page. The last page of each task provides a special Submit button that signifies that they have completed work on that task. This makes the task's answers available for the instructor to review.

The instructor uses a special tool to review task submissions. This tool presents the submitted work of each student in turn as a single web page with an essay box alongside each answer and a special essay box, a grade box, and accept/return buttons for the task as a whole. The accept button accepts the work as completed, assigns the grade in the grade box to the task as a whole. The contents of the text boxes will automatically appear alongside the answers when the student revisits the task again.