Fusion of E-textbooks, learning management systems, and social networking sites: A mash-up development

Online education has provided good opportunities for educationally disadvantaged people. However, some traditional learning management systems (LMSs), the base systems of online education, had the limitations in offering standardized education for diversified learners with different skills, objectives, abilities, preferences, and backgrounds. In addition, the traditional LMSs, which required a constant connection of the Internet, could not be used where it is not available, that is, in the half of the world. Thus, we developed a new learning platform for large-scale online courses (LSOC), called “the Creative Higher Education with Learning Object (CHiLO)”. CHiLO is a comprehensive, open-network learning system which can realize e-textbooks, competency-based education (CBE), digital badges, and social learning. CHiLO can contribute to future research on next-generation learning content based on e-books and a flexible, diversified learning environment for people worldwide.