A Growing Book for Distance Learning

Abstract

The Growing Book is an ever-expanding body of knowledge created by a team of experts. It is an electronic book co-developed by a group of teachers who are geographically dispersed throughout the world and collaborate in teaching and research. Since the course materials are constantly evolving, the Growing Book must be constantly updated. The Growing Book is used by each teacher both in the local classroom as well as in the distance learning environment and accessible by multilingual students. Each chapter of he Growing Book is owned by an instructor who may utilize different tools for distance learning, self learning and assessment. A macro university framework provides the experimental test bed to investigate how to design and manage the growing book so that it can be accessed by people with different linguistic skills for effective teaching and research. We describe the basic operations such as Match, Abstract, Weave and Customize, which can be used to extract and organize information from the multi-level, multimedia, multi-lingual book.