A new pedagogical design for geo-informatics courses using an e-training support system

The current study seeks to introduce a new pedagogical design for geo-informatics courses using an e-training support system. Laurillard’s conversational approach based on conceptual representation for both instructor and learner was used to form the framework. As the current study specifically interested in training as a special form for learning, so, we sought methods and strategies to integrate requirements of both company and employee into the design of training programs. Therefore, a competency perspective was adopted into the conversational framework to use learning design that leads to learning activities tightly related to the needs of the company and employee. The above framework has been developed with special consideration to the underpinning pedagogical principles and the needs of lifelong learning that continues after the training has been completed. The implementation of the developed framework needs a special computerized system, so an e-training support system (ETSS) was developed to realize the framework. ETSS is an open source and standard-based infrastructure to enable and foster competence development and exchange of learning activities and learning units. Although the domain of the current study focuses on geo-informatics, ETSS is applicable to any other domain. The developed framework through its ETSS implementation were evaluated in a typical training environment. The results indicated that the best method in training was the training with the developed system with 91.5 % in comparison with the traditional training method with 81.4 %.