4 research outputs found
Social personalized e-learning framework
This thesis discusses the topic of how to improve adaptive and personalized e-learning in order to provide novel learning experiences. A recent literature review revealed that adaptive and personalized e-learning systems are not widely used. There is a lack of interoperability between adaptive systems and learning management systems, in addition to limited collaborative and social features. First of all, this thesis investigates the interoperability issue via two case studies. The first case study focuses on how to achieve interoperability between adaptive systems and learning management systems using e-learning standards and the second case study focuses on how to augment e-learning standards with adaptive features. Secondly, this thesis proposes a new social framework for personalized e-learning, in order to provide adaptive and personalized e-learning platforms with new social features. This is not just about creating learning content, but also about developing new ways of learning. For instance, in the presented vision, adaptive learning does not refer to individuals only, but also to groups. Furthermore, the boundaries between authors and learners become less distinct in the Web 2.0 context. Finally, a new social personalized prototype is introduced based on the new social framework for personalized e-learning in order to test and evaluate this framework. The implementation and evaluation of the new system were carried out through a number of case studies.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceUniversity of Warwick. Dept. of Computer ScienceGBUnited Kingdo
Supporting delivery of adaptive hypermedia
Although Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) can improve upon the traditional one-size-fitsall
learning approach through Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH), it still has
problems with the authoring and delivery processes that are holding back the
widespread usage of AEH. In this thesis we present the development of the Adaptive
Delivery Environment (ADE) delivery system and use the lessons learnt during its
development along with feedback from adaptation specification authors,
researchers and other evaluations to formalise a list of essential and recommended
optional features for AEH delivery engines.
In addition to this we also investigate how the powerful adaptation techniques
recommended in the above list and described in Brusilovsky and Knutov’s
taxonomies can be implemented in a way that minimises the technical knowledge of
adaptation authors needed to use these techniques. As the adaptation functionality
increases, we research how a modular framework for adaptation strategies can be
created to increase the reusability of parts of an AH system’s overall adaptation
specification. Following on from this, we investigate how reusing these modular
strategies via a pedagogically based visual editor can enable adaptation authors
without programming experience to use these powerful adaptation techniques
Manual and automatic authoring for adaptive hypermedia
Adaptive Hypermedia allows online content to be tailored specifically to the needs
of the user. This is particularly valuable in educational systems, where a student
might benefit from a learning experience which only displays (or recommends)
content that they need to know.
Authoring for adaptive systems requires content to be divided into stand-alone
fragments which must then be labelled with sufficient pedagogical metadata.
Authors must also create a pedagogical strategy that selects the appropriate
content depending on (amongst other things) the learner's profile. This authoring
process is time-consuming and unfamiliar to most non-technical authors. Therefore,
to ensure that students (of all ages, ability level and interests) can benefit from
Adaptive Educational Hypermedia, authoring tools need to be usable by a range of
educators. The overall aim of this thesis is therefore to identify the ways that this
authoring process can be simplified.
The research in this thesis describes the changes that were made to the My Online
Teacher (MOT) tool in order to address issues such as functionality and usability.
The thesis also describes usability and functionality changes that were made to the
GRAPPLE Authoring Tool (GAT), which was developed as part of a European FP7
project. These two tools (which utilise different authoring paradigms) were then
used within a usability evaluation, allowing the research to draw a comparison
between the two toolsets.
The thesis also describes how educators can reuse their existing non-adaptive
(linear) material (such as presentations and Wiki articles) by importing content into
an adaptive authoring system
Evaluation of interoperability between MOT and regular learning management systems
Adaptive Hypermedia content offers personalization; however, (re-) using such material with regular Learning Management Systems (LMS) is not yet straightforward. Ideally, materials created once should be usable anywhere. One such vehicle for reusability is represented by e-learning standards. Thus, here we describe the extension and evaluation of My Online Teacher (MOT), an adaptive hypermedia authoring system, to which compatibility with IMS Question and Test Interoperability (IMS QTI) and IMS Content Packaging (IMS CP) was added. This way, MOT authors can use materials dedicated to learning process adaptation on any standards-compatible LMS. In this paper we evaluate the converters from MOT to IMS CP and IMS QTI via both qualitative and quantitative analyses. This paper reports our hypothetical findings, their implementations, and the joint results of the evaluations of the converters. Finally, this work describes a significant step towards the little explored avenue of adaptive collaborative systems, based on extant learning standards and popular LMS