EDUCAUSE Quarterly Articles and Knowledge Management

Many university faculty create their own websites or use a course management system to upload course materials for online instruction. Course content and files are mostly organized and presented in a linear structure and placed in a series of folders and subfolders. An alternative approach to navigate, organize, and sequence Web-based content is to use a computer generated mind map – an E-Map. With its unique storage and organizational capacity, E-Maps not only provide a user-friendly e-learning structure, but also can effectively manage knowledge in a much more efficient manner than using a linear approach to navigate and access Web-based content.

The purpose of this article is to examine how E-Maps can be used as a graphical interface for presenting and organizing Web-based course content and files online. Explored in this article is a brief overview of mind maps , mind mapping software, how using E-Maps as a graphic organizer can facilitate learning, and some instructional application examples of using E-Maps for Web-based instruction.