Personalisation in MOOCs: a critical literature review

The advent and rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have brought many issues to the area of educational technology. Researchers in the field have been addressing these issues such as pedagogical quality of MOOCs, high attrition rates, and sustainability of MOOCs. However, MOOCs personalisation has not been subject of the wide discussions around MOOCs. This paper presents a critical literature survey and analysis of the available literature on personalisation in MOOCs to identify the needs, the current states and efforts to personalise learning in MOOCs. The findings illustrate that there is a growing attention to personalisation to improve learners’ individual learning experiences in MOOCs. In order to implement personalised services, personalised learning path, personalised assessment and feedback, personalised forum thread and recommendation service for related learning materials or learning tasks are commonly applied

Quality Assessment for E-learning: a Benchmarking Approach (Third edition)

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a set of benchmarks, quality criteria and notes for guidance against which e-learning programmes and their support systems may be judged. The manual should therefore be seen primarily as a reference tool for the assessment or review of e-learning programmes and the systems which support them. However, the manual should also prove to be useful to staff in institutions concerned with the design, development, teaching, assessment and support of e-learning programmes. It is hoped that course developers, teachers and other stakeholders will see the manual as a useful development and/or improvement tool for incorporation in their own institutional systems of monitoring, evaluation and enhancement

Mappe concettuali dinamiche per supportare i processi di e-learning e di valutazione

When technologies enter the learning processes, it is always advisable to analyse the changes they trigger carefully. This is because their effects are difficult to predict and generalize. There are several factors related to the times, ways, status, culture, even digital, of the subjects involved and therefore any statement should derive from careful observations and cautious analysis.This article moves along the line of research traced by a laboratory of the University of Salerno, the laboratory RIMEDI@, using for a further academic year, a technology within a learning environment, the e-Lena platform. In fact, this use derives from a first phase of experimentation from which the results have emerged identified possible future developments. After that, a series of corrective measures have been implemented to proceed now with this second experiment, which is either to confirm or refute the results already obtained and to verify the effectiveness of the changes made. The access to the environment is provided in addition to the classroom teaching, so it assumes a form of support and not a substitute form of in presence teaching. We tried to verify if our enriched online learning environment could stimulate remediation processes between digital and analogic artefacts in students and represent a mean to support automatic evaluation processes. In other words, we would answer the question related about if it favours the development of meaningful learning. The use of this technology was therefore observed and the data collected analysed to be able to synthesize conclusions and outline new objectives in order to move the next steps in research. The results confirm once again that the environment built in e-Lena offers an effective support to students. It takes a significant role both in activating remediation experiences and in automating evaluation processes, so it could encourage the development and the consolidation of learning.Quando le tecnologie “entrano” nei processi di apprendimento, è opportuno analizzare con attenzione i cambiamenti che attivano. Questo perché gli effetti che producono sono difficili da prevedere e da generalizzare. Sono diversi i fattori che interagiscono (tempi, modi, cultura anche digitale dei soggetti coinvolti) e ogni affermazione dovrebbe derivare da osservazioni accurate eanalisi prudenti. Questo articolo si muove lungo una direttrice di ricerca del laboratorio RIMEDI@dell’Università di Salerno nel quale, nell’ultimo triennio, è stato sperimentato ed implementato un ambiente virtuale di apprendimento all’interno della piattaforma e-Lena. L’accesso all’ambiente viene fornito in aggiunta all’insegnamento in aula, quindi assume una forma di supportoe non una forma sostitutiva di insegnamento in presenza. Obiettivo dell’indagine è stato quello di verificare se, e in qual misura, l’ambiente di apprendimento online potesse stimolare negli studenti processi di rimediazione tra artefatti digitali e analogici e rappresentare un mezzo per supportare processi automatici di valutazione. I risultati confermano che l’ambiente costruito in e-Lena offre un supporto efficace agli studenti. Esso assume un ruolo significativo sia nell’attivazione delle esperienze di rimediazione che nell’automazione dei processi di valutazione, in modo da incoraggiare lo sviluppo e il consolidamento degli apprendimenti

Innovating Pedagogy 2015: Open University Innovation Report 4

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation

Improvements of Decision Support Systems for Public Administrations via a Mechanism of Co-creation of Value

This paper focuses on a possible improvement of knowledge-based decision support systems for human resource management within Public Administrations, using a co-creation of value's mechanism, according to the Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) paradigm. In particular, it applies ontology-driven data entry procedures to trigger the cooperation between the Public Administration itself and its employees. Advantages in such sense are evident: constraining the data entry process by means of the term definition ontology improves the quality of gathered data, thus reducing potential mismatching problems and allowing a suitable skill gap analysis among real and ideal workers competence profiles. The procedure foresees the following steps: analyzing organograms and job descriptions; modelling Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes (KSA) for job descriptions; transforming KSAs of job descriptions into a standard-based model with integrations of other characteristics; extracting information from Curricula Vitae according to the selected model; comparing profiles and roles played by the employees. The 'a priori' ontology-driven approach adequately supports the operations that involve both the Public Administration and employees, as for the data storage of job descriptions and curricula vitae. The comparison step is useful to understand if employees perform roles that are coherent with their own professional profiles. The proposed approach has been experimented on a small test case and the results show that its objective evaluation represents an improvement for a decision support system for the re-organization of Italian Public Administrations where, unfortunately often, people are engaged in activities that are not so close to their competences

Integrating MOOCs in physics preliminary undergraduate education: beyond large size lectures

In this paper, the authors discuss the effectiveness of MOOCs as part of a pedagogical strategy aimed at supporting Physics’ preliminary undergraduate students in large-size lectures. Our study is based on an experimental activity based on a blended course, which integrated a parallel MOOC delivered through the POK (PoliMi Open Knowledge, http://www.pok.polimi.it), the Politecnico di Milano’s MOOC portal. The blended model also delivered face-to-face activities that included intensive technology enhanced learning, like feedback based on clickers. Specifically, we introduce the several elements of the approach (the tutors’ pedagogy, the adoption of clickers, the diversity amongst learning groups) and its process of implementation. The findings in this study highlight that the integrated model is effective in terms’ of students’ learning both for small and large size lectures. More importantly, it was found that the students in large size lectures demonstrated similar or even better performance than students in a small size group. Moreover, the students in all sizes lectures showed higher satisfaction with the MOOCs’ against other factors adopted within the learning design

How to design for persistence and retention in MOOCs?

Design of educational interventions is typically carried out following a design cycle involving phases of investigation, conceptualization, prototyping, implementation, execution and evaluation. This cycle can be applied at different levels of granularity e.g. learning activity, module, course or programme. In this paper we consider an aspect of learner behavior that can be critical to the success of many MOOCs i.e. their persistence to study, and the related theme of learner retention. We reflect on the impact that consideration of these can have on design decisions at different stages in the design cycle with the aim of en-hancing MOOC design in relation to learner persistence and retention, with particular attention to the European context

A framework for structuring prerequisite relations between concepts in educational textbooks

In our age we are experiencing an increasing availability of digital educational resources and self-regulated learning. In this scenario, the development of automatic strategies for organizing the knowledge embodied in educational resources has a tremendous potential for building personalized learning paths and applications such as intelligent textbooks and recommender systems of learning materials. To this aim, a straightforward approach consists in enriching the educational materials with a concept graph, i.a. a knowledge structure where key concepts of the subject matter are represented as nodes and prerequisite dependencies among such concepts are also explicitly represented. This thesis focuses therefore on prerequisite relations in textbooks and it has two main research goals. The first goal is to define a methodology for systematically annotating prerequisite relations in textbooks, which is functional for analysing the prerequisite phenomenon and for evaluating and training automatic methods of extraction. The second goal concerns the automatic extraction of prerequisite relations from textbooks. These two research goals will guide towards the design of PRET, i.e. a comprehensive framework for supporting researchers involved in this research issue. The framework described in the present thesis allows indeed researchers to conduct the following tasks: 1) manual annotation of educational texts, in order to create datasets to be used for machine learning algorithms or for evaluation as gold standards; 2) annotation analysis, for investigating inter-annotator agreement, graph metrics and in-context linguistic features; 3) data visualization, for visually exploring datasets and gaining insights of the problem that may lead to improve algorithms; 4) automatic extraction of prerequisite relations. As for the automatic extraction, we developed a method that is based on burst analysis of concepts in the textbook and we used the gold dataset with PR annotation for its evaluation, comparing the method with other metrics for PR extraction