COFALE: An Authoring System for Supporting Cognitive Flexibility

Constructivism is a learning theory that states that people learn best when they actively construct their own knowledge. A significant number of ICT-based constructivist learning systems have been proposed in recent years. A critical problem related to the design and use of this kind of systems has been the lack of a practical means to facilitate the instructional design process. Our research aims to help designing truly constructivist learning environments. Our approach is based on a set of operational criteria for certain aspects of constructivism. We use these criteria as a useful pedagogical framework to provide tools and guidelines facilitating the instructional design process. One facet often mentioned as being strongly relevant to constructivism is cognitive flexibility. This paper presents COFALE, a new domain-independent e-Learning platform that could be used to build learning environments supporting cognitive flexibility, and an example of its use: the design of a course on recursion