Supporting the development of mobile adaptive learning environments: A case study

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. E. Martín and R. M. Carro, "Supporting the development of mobile adaptive learning environments: A case study" IEEE Transactions on learning technologies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 23-36, january-march 2009In this paper, we describe a system to support the generation of adaptive mobile learning environments. In these environments, students and teachers can accomplish different types of individual and collaborative activities in different contexts. Activities are dynamically recommended to users depending on different criteria (user features, context, etc.), and workspaces to support the corresponding activity accomplishment are dynamically generated. In this paper, we present the main characteristics of the mechanism that suggests the most suitable activities at each situation, the system in which this mechanism has been implemented, the authoring tool to facilitate the specification of context-based adaptive m-learning environments, and two environments generated following this approach will be presented. The outcomes of two case studies carried out with students of the first and second courses of “Computer Engineering” at the “Universidad Auto´noma de Madrid” are also presented.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, project number TIN2007-64718

Authoring of Adaptive and Adaptable Hypermedia

Authoring of Adaptive Hypermedia has been long considered as secondary to adaptive hypermedia delivery. However, authoring is not trivial at all. There exist some approaches to help authors to build adaptive-hypermedia-based systems, yet there is a strong need for high-level approaches, formalisms and tools that support and facilitate the description of reusable adaptive websites. Only recently have we noticed a shift in interest, as it became clearer that the implementation-oriented approach would forever keep adaptive hypermedia away from the ‘layman’ author. The creator of adaptive hypermedia cannot be expected to know all facets of this process, but can be reasonably trusted to be an expert in one of them. It is therefore necessary to research and establish the components of an adaptive hypermedia system from an authoring perspective, catering for the different author personas that are required. This type of research has proven to lead to a modular view on the adaptive hypermedia

Architecture of a system for context-based adaptation in m-learning

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. E. Martin, N. Andueza, and R.M. Carro, “Architecture of a system for context-based adaptation in m-learning”, in Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2006. Sixth International, Kerkrade, 2006, pp. 252-254In this paper, the architecture of a system that supports context-based adaptation for m-learning is presented. This system manages data about users and activities so that the most suitable activities to be accomplished at each time are proposed to each user. This decision is not only based on the user's personal features, preferences or previous actions but also on information about the specific user's context, including spare time, location and available devicesThis work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, project TIN2004-0314

Un mecanismo basado en tareas y reglas para la creación de sistemas hipermedia adaptativos: aplicación a la educación a través de Internet

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Escuela Técnica Superior de Informática, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura:08-06-200

Creación de cursos adaptativos en TANGOW mediante tareas, reglas y elementos multimedia

En este artículo se describe, en términos generales, el proceso de diseño de un curso adaptativo accesible a través de Internet mediante el sistema TANGOW. En este proceso de diseño se establece una clara separación entre la estructura del curso, para cuya construcción se utilizan tareas y reglas docentes, y la asociación de contenidos a esta estructura. A continuación se analizan los distintos tipos de adaptación que pueden definirse durante el diseño de un curso entre las que se incluyen la adaptación en función del perfil del estudiante, las dependencias teóricas y prácticas entre tareas y la creación de distintas versiones de un mismo fragmento de contenido. Se describen, también, distintas aproximaciones metodológicas que facilitan la labor de di-seño de cursos adaptativos. El artículo termina con algunas conclusiones y trabajo futuro.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por la Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT), con los números de proyecto TEL97-0306 y TEL1999-0181

An adaptive driving course based on HTML dynamic generation

Reprinted from the Proceedings of WebNet World Conference on the WWW and Internet 1999 with permission of AACE (http://www.aace.org).This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the World Conference on the WWW and Internet (WebNet '99) held in Honolulu (United States) on 1999In this paper we describe a new approach for developing adaptive Web based courses. These courses are defined by means of teaching tasks which correspond to basic knowledge units, and rules which describe how teaching tasks are divided into subtasks. Both tasks and rules are used at execution time to guide the students during their learning process by determining the set of achievable tasks to be presented to the student at every step. Adaptivity is implemented by presenting students with different HTML pages depending on their profile, their previous actions, and the active learning strategy. The HTML pages presented to the students are generated dynamically from general information about the type of media elements associated to each task and their layout. The whole approach is exemplified by means of a course on traffic signs

An object-oriented approach to task tree management in the TANGOW system

This paper describes the object-oriented features of TANGOW (Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the WWW), a tool for developing Internet-based courses. This system facilitates the construction of adaptive learning environments for the WWW and is able to guide the students during their learning process based on student profiles and previous actions. In the TANGOW system, the course contents is modelled in terms of objects and relationships among them. This allows the course designer to reuse the same descriptive objects in different sections of the same course, or even in completely different courses. In addition, information about the student and his/her actions when interacting with the system is also stored as dynamic objects, which are instantiated at runtime. This makes it easy to access and update student related data.This paper has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project number TEL97-0306

TANGOW: Un sistema de enseñanza adaptativa a través de Internet

Proceedings of the Congreso Nacional de Informática Educativa CONIED'99 at Puertollano, Spain, November 1999. Published on CD.En este artículo se describe TANGOW, Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the Web, un sistema para la enseñanza de cursos accesibles a través de Internet. Los cursos definidos con TANGOW se adaptan a los estudiantes teniendo en cuenta tanto sus características propias (edad, idioma, etc.), como el conjunto de acciones que realizan durante el proceso de aprendizaje. Existe una estructura asociada con cada estudiante en la que se almacena el itinerario seguido por el estudiante en su interacción con el sistema, y que se restaura al inicio de cada sesión. Los cursos gestionados por el sistema se definen en términos de Tareas Docentes y Reglas. Las Reglas especifican la(s) relación(es) entre Tareas que, a su vez, corresponden a unidades conceptuales definidas por el diseñador del curso. Los ejemplos que se utilizan para ilustrar las características del sistema forman parte de un curso sobre educación vial.Este trabajo ha sido realizado dentro del proyecto InterEdu, financiado por la Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT), proyecto número TEL97-0306

The impact of learning styles on student grouping for collaborative learning: a case study

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11257-006-9012-7Learning style models constitute a valuable tool for improving individual learning by the use of adaptation techniques based on them. In this paper, we present how the benefit of considering learning styles with adaptation purposes, as part of the user model, can be extended to the context of collaborative learning as a key feature for group formation. We explore the effects that the combination of students with different learning styles in specific groups may have in the final results of the tasks accomplished by them collaboratively. With this aim, a case study with 166 students of computer science has been carried out, from which conclusions are drawn. We also describe how an existing web-based system can take advantage of learning style information in order to form more productive groups. Our ongoing work concerning the automatic extraction of grouping rules starting from data about previous interactions within the system is also outlined. Finally, we present our challenges, related to the continuous improvement of collaboration by the use and dynamic modification of automatic grouping rules.This project has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, TIN2004-03140