Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

The danger of impersonalisation in mass personalised learning

This paper discusses the dichotomy between socialisation and personalisation, and questions whether the two can coexist. It presents evidence that socialisation does lead to improved student achievement and that there is a significant issue with personalisation, in that it limits social discovery because it does not cater for the development of an energetic learning community to share and exchange information. This is particularly relevant in the context of mass personalisation and must be a key consideration when developing personalised learning environments

Personalisation and its implications for work and employment in the voluntary sector

This report assesses the impact of personalisation on social care, particularly focussing on implications for the workforce. Personalisation is often presented as being transformative in the manner in which it empowers both people who use services and employees. The report considers the latter aspect in particular by assessing some of the workforce implications of personalisation. It reports research drawn from policymakers and three voluntary organisations, with interviews with managers, employees and people who use services. The main findings from the research are: Policymakers were enthusiastic about the potential benefits of personalisation with regard to the opportunities for the independence of people who receive services and enhancement of workforce skills. Policymakers feared the impact of public spending cuts and recognised the cultural and operational barriers within local authorities to the implementation of personalisation. Policymakers were enthusiastic about the role of the voluntary sector and its workforce in terms of its contribution to delivering personalised services, whilst recognising concerns about skills gaps among employees and the impact of deteriorating terms and conditions of employment on worker morale. Management in the three organisations largely embraced the principles of personalisation, whilst also recognising the pressure from local authorities to use the personalisation agenda to cut costs. Employees in the main understood the principles of personalisation but revealed limited awareness of the implications for the changes in service budgets. Organisations were changing their approach to staff recruitment in order to develop a better fit between the interests of people receiving services and employees delivering them. Management anticipated significant changes to the working hours of employees providing personalised services, which was met with a degree of anxiety among some employees. Management recognised the need to address skills gaps among employees in areas such as risk enablement, decision-making and community connecting. Employees generally welcomed the potential enhancement of their skills through personalisation. Job security concerns were apparent among the majority of front-line employees as a consequence of personalisation. Organisations were balancing the move towards risk enablement and cutting costs with the need to protect service user and worker health and safety, particularly in relation to managing challenging behavior. Personalisation brings with it the potential to fragment pay and conditions away from collective terms towards linking them more closely to the value of individual service budgets. People who receive services revealed limited awareness of changes to service budgets, their choices over the service provider, choices over who provides their services and there was limited evidence of empowerment and greater choice

Self-directed Support: Personalisation, Choice and Control

Since the late 1990s, there has been a concerted policy drive across social care towards cash based modes of support and strategies to personalise services. Support for this shift was initiated by the disabled peoples’ movement, both in the UK and globally. Policies introducing direct payments in lieu of provided services have been secured gradually as a central plank of the campaign for independent living. Successive governments have promoted a shift towards personalisation as part of a wider focus to develop local care markets and to facilitate enhanced choice and control in service provision. In Scotland, this has been pursued through new legislation for self-directed support. The authors examine some of the key themes and debates emerging from the implementation of this policy. These include a look at the evolution of this concept and its development within the wider personalisation agenda, as well as the changing roles for users, carers, local authorities and service providers. The authors focus on the impact of change for front-line workers and reassess the progress of personalisation across the UK and in Europe during a time of widespread austerity and financial cuts. Written for professional and academic audiences Self-directed Support: Personalisation, Choice & Control will stimulate those wrestling with these themes from policy and professional perspectives and provide essential analysis for those studying health and social policy

A study of personalisation and the factors affecting the uptake of personal budgets by mental health service users in the UK - A research study commissioned by MIND

This project was commissioned by Mind to add to its knowledge base and existing work on Personalisation so as to support individuals to have greater choice and control over their care and support needs. The project was funded by the Department of Health as part of its Strategic Development fund „Personalisation and Choice of Care and Support (IESD1) 2011‟. This report provides an overview of the main findings of this qualitative study, exploring the concept of personalisation, the factors affecting its operationalisation by voluntary and statutory sector organisations, and service users‟ experiences of its implementation, particularly in relation to what affects their uptake and experience of Personal Budgets. In the course of our investigation into current practice and experience, we have identified a number of barriers and enablers. Our view is that the impact of effective action to tackle the barriers will result in an improved experience of the Personal Budget process and its outcomes for carers and front line staff as well as service users. Recommendations are made for future work in this area

Genetic Programming for Smart Phone Personalisation

Personalisation in smart phones requires adaptability to dynamic context based on user mobility, application usage and sensor inputs. Current personalisation approaches, which rely on static logic that is developed a priori, do not provide sufficient adaptability to dynamic and unexpected context. This paper proposes genetic programming (GP), which can evolve program logic in realtime, as an online learning method to deal with the highly dynamic context in smart phone personalisation. We introduce the concept of collaborative smart phone personalisation through the GP Island Model, in order to exploit shared context among co-located phone users and reduce convergence time. We implement these concepts on real smartphones to demonstrate the capability of personalisation through GP and to explore the benefits of the Island Model. Our empirical evaluations on two example applications confirm that the Island Model can reduce convergence time by up to two-thirds over standalone GP personalisation.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure

Theory of cognitive distortions: personalisation

In a previous paper (Compléments pour une théorie des distorsions cognitives, Journal de Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive, 2007), we did present some elements aimed at contributing to a general theory of cognitive distortions. Based on the reference class, the duality and the system of taxa, these elements led to distinguish between the general cognitive distortions (dichotomous reasoning, disqualification of one pole, minimisation, maximisation) and the specific cognitive distortions (disqualifying the positive, selective abstraction, catastrophism). By also distinguishing between three levels of reasoning - the instantiation stage, the interpretation stage and the generalisation stage - we did also define two other cognitive distortions: over-generalisation and mislabelling (Théorie des distorsions cognitives : la sur-généralisation et l'étiquetage, Journal de Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive, 2009). We currently extend this model to another classical cognitive distortion: personalisation

Personalisation: The Beginning Of A New Dawn Or The End Of The Road For Third Sector Support For Carers?

Personalisation has become a key aspiration of adult social care policy in England. Perspectives vary though as its meaning and the extent to which it signals a new paradigm in care. It is being seen as not only relevant to those directly accessing care but also for their carers. Carers’ support is an area in which third sector organisations (TSOs) have traditionally played a significant role, and changes to funding and the expected model of care will therefore potentially have an impact on the third sector. This study explores the issues that arise for TSOs who work with carers from the introduction of personalisation, through interviews with TSOs and public sector commissioners and policy makers

Mobile content personalisation using intelligent user profile approach

As there are several limitations using mobile internet, mobile content personalisation seems to be an alternative to enhance the experience of using mobile internet. In this paper, we propose the mobile content personalisation framework to facilitate collaboration between the client and the server. This paper investigates clustering and classification techniques using K-means and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to predict user's desired content and WAP pages based on device's listed-oriented menu approach. We make use of the user profile and user's information ranking matrix to make prediction of the desired information for the user. Experimental results show that it can generate promising prediction. The results show that it works best when used for predicting 1 matched menu item on the screen

A literature synthesis of personalised technology-enhanced learning: what works and why

Personalised learning, having seen both surges and declines in popularity over the past few decades, is once again enjoying a resurgence. Examples include digital resources tailored to a particular learner’s needs, or individual feedback on a student’s assessed work. In addition, personalised technology-enhanced learning (TEL) now seems to be attracting interest from philanthropists and venture capitalists indicating a new level of enthusiasm for the area and a potential growth industry. However, these industries may be driven by profit rather than pedagogy, and hence it is vital these new developments are informed by relevant, evidence-based research. For many people, personalised learning is an ambiguous and even loaded term that promises much but does not always deliver. This paper provides an in-depth and critical review and synthesis of how personalisation has been represented in the literature since 2000, with a particular focus on TEL. We examine the reasons why personalised learning can be beneficial and examine how TEL can contribute to this. We also unpack how personalisation can contribute to more effective learning. Lastly, we examine the limitations of personalised learning and discuss the potential impacts on wider stakeholders