Yotta: A knowledge map centric e-learning system

Current e-learning systems are primarily resource oriented, rather than cognition oriented. To reduce learners' cognitive overload in e-learning, we proposed a novel e-learning system Yotta tackling the problem of knowledge acquisition, knowledge presentation, and knowledge resources management. The granularity for knowledge acquisition in Yotta is based on knowledge units that are the smallest integral learning objects in a specific domain. Knowledge presentation and navigation in Yotta is based on knowledge maps, which can exhibit knowledge and the intrinsic knowledge relations at both concept level and knowledge unit level. Automatic knowledge unit extraction and knowledge map construction techniques are also discussed in this paper. Yotta allows for huge concurrent access and enormous resource storage, as it is deployed on a cloud platform with the Hadoop distributed file system. The Yotta demo has already been implemented on our campus network, and has been approved by hundreds of students. Yotta offers new ideas for building elearning systems, and its core techniques still require further study.