The Development of a Sustainable e-Learning Model — Using Construction Safety and Health Education as an Example

This paper presents a vision on the development of a sustainable e-learning model (SELM) for promoting the education about a discipline, such as construction safety and health (S&H). The model is designed to capture the process knowledge individuals obtain from the learning activities so that the knowledge can be preserved, shared and reused. An example of such knowledge is the cognitive acknowledgements of useful educational resources (CAUER). Important model components include discipline and learner analysis, e-learning, search and social bookmarking technologies, knowledge codification, and discipline-specific resource repository. The socialization network, the discipline concepts, and the resource repository together present a unique source of domain knowledge which could have positive impacts upon the utilized search technology. This would generate a cyclic effect within SELM and enable the model's sustainability fundamentally. The paper explains the model design and reports some preliminary findings from a case study.