Using learning maps for visualization of adaptive learning path components

Most e-learning courses are still offered linearly as online book supplemented by interactive media and exercises. Therefore representing the whole content of an e-learning course by some kind of hierarchical table of content is sufficient. When using an adaptive e-learning system, individual learning paths may be used and suggested to the users, e.g. in dependence of a given answer of an exercise. This paper presents our extended concept how to represent such e-learning content of an adaptive system using the metaphor of a map. The work incorporates different perspectives from cartography and geomatics, pedagogy, didactics, information visualization and computer science into a practicable method for representing e-learning content as learning map using cities for learning units and buildings for knowledge units. Therefore this work might also be considered in the discussion of spatial turn.