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Top1. Introduction
The rapid advances of digital and internet technologies in recent years, providing more education opportunities to learn outside of traditional classrooms has gained much attention as a new theme for prospective learners to acquire knowledge in a more convenient way. In such a new e-Learning paradigm, many efforts have been made to build web-/cloud-based learning management systems (LMS) (Stone and Zheng, 2014) that support the controllable processes of learning activities with curricular content delivered to learners. In general, from the managerial perspective, this means that each e-Learning process is monitored and controlled by an LMS for achieving expected learning objectives; in contrast, from the learning perspective, this means that desired contents are delivered in the controlled process by the LMS with some sophisticated ways for achieving expected objectives.
In our best knowledge, e-Learning is managed for concerning what learners really care about, which includes the recognition of expected learning objectives and how these objectives are achieved by required learning activities under a commitment mechanism (i.e., engaging the achievement of these objectives through a designated process that monitors and controls these learning activities). Many approaches that deal with (part of) these needs have been presented; most of which focus mainly on specifying/directing the required learning activities, including for instance (1) SCORM and its specific features (SCORM 2004, 2015; SCORM, 2015) that use sequencing control modes to represent the relationships between learning activities in an activity tree; (2) rule-based systems (Hoyos-Rivera, et al., 2006; Marinković and Tomaš, 2011) that allow, by means of access rules, specifying and directing a specific process of learning activities; (3) relationship-based systems (Romero et al., 2014) that use logic relationships to define a course structure with the relationships among its containing course components; and (4) workflow-based systems (Cao, et al., 2009) that employ the power of workflows to define a stream of activities that constitute a learning process.
In general, these approaches support well the provision of a controlled process of learning activities. They however have the following deficiencies: (1) their mechanisms do not address the delivery ways of desired contents in the controlled process (i.e., how these contents are delivered in attractive formats for achieving expected objectives); and (2) there are no discussions about the implementation of such delivery ways by using selected publication formats. In our view, delivering desired contents in attractive formats is beneficial for being able to motivate the learners to pay more attention to reading these contents. For instance, keeping contents vivid by employing such internals as contrast colours, bright pictures, and dynamic animations can strengthen the richness of these contents and hence promote the learners’ interests in these contents (Ortony, et al., 1990); further, keeping contents interactive by imposing interactive media such as browsing links and reminder notes can help the learners to initiate or react to a communication for motivating their attention on these contents.