This paper discusses the design patterns for courseware objects in Extensible Learning Environment with Courseware Object Architecture (ELECOA). ELECOA is intended to provide flexibility to enhance functions of learning environments without losing content reusability. A key concept to achieve both function extensibility and content reusability is “courseware objects”, which are program modules included to implement new functions. To allow any combinations of courseware objects, communication patters between them need to be defined in advance. Investigation for such communication patterns shows that four communication patterns defined for the original ELECOA-based self-learning environment can be applied to the group learning environment without modification. Design patterns are proposed for courseware objects to comply with the communication patterns, then it is demonstrated that various practical learning scenarios can be implemented with the courseware objects employing the design patterns.

Active learning, which makes students active more than listening, is attracting interest in educational fields. In this study, the authors focus on supporting reflection. Through the experiences of practice in higher education, the authors found following two issues about active learning. (1) Students tend to not explain their notion based on systematized contents such as textbook or materials provided by teacher. (2) It is difficult to analyze the results of reflection. The authors tackled to the issues using knowledge explication method. Knowledge explication is the methodology to explicate and structure the site-specific knowledge based on common knowledge. The site-specific knowledge denotes the knowledge which depends on the particular site and the common knowledge denotes the knowledge which is common in the broader community than the site. As a result, the authors confirmed the following effects of knowledge explication through the two practice. (1) Students can explain their notion based on systematized lesson-contents. (2) Teacher can analyze the results of reflection from the various perspectives. The contributions of this research are to introduce the knowledge explication method to higher education and to provide the case study of it. Both the method and the practical information can be useful for the community for information and systems in education.

It is necessary for current teachers to design instructions in consideration of “How to learn”. So, university students who aim to become teachers should achieve the following two main goals: 1) to understand that there are various instructional/learning strategies, 2) to improve their skills in designing lessons that integrate a global strategy for attaining an overall goal in the lesson and local strategies for attaining sub-goals. In this study, to achieve these goals, we have made use of a system called “FIMA-Light” which visualizes lesson structures from lesson plans. In this paper, we report on a practical use of goal-decomposition trees produced by FIMA-Light in lectures of university. The results of the practice showed that the university students could achieve the following goals: 1) to enhance consciousness about local sub-goals in the lesson, 2) to enhance consciousness about relations between instructional/learning scenes and the sub-goals.