 Belen |
Dear Martyn, Great topic! Maybe this is a question more about how we define "Personalisation in eLearning" Here is my definition: A personalised eLearning system is one where the users can specify how they would like to receive not only information but "contents" (text, video, audio files...). In such case, accessibility will became a user preference. If the eLearning resources are delivered through a website, we tend to consider accessibility as a question of following WAI 2.0 standards, WAI-ARIA initiative... Then the user can choose for example a website page in large fonts and in high contrast, an appropiate CSS style... things like that. But the real problem is when users try to download eLearning contents (files) according to their accessibility preferences... as those kind of contents not always exist! For example, imagine that I am a student and there is a video amongst the learning materials that I can access within a elearning platform to study a particular subject. Does that video support closed captioning - in the language I speak? If not, please show me a list of videos that satisfy my preferences. If the learning resource is a map, users could choose a text equivalent, such as the textual driving directions. But not all the resources are ready for that! Sometimes, when a teacher prepares a particular elearning resource, he/she adapts it to be accessible only when he/she knows that they have a pupil with some kind of functional diversity... I have read that there is an specification called "Access-For-All" from the IMS Global Learning Consortium (http:/ However, these are first steps, but maybe the real problem is standardisation to use the specifications... As far as I know, the W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications Working group is in the process of transforming some Access-For-All preferences into standards in order to define how content is delivered to all devices (let's say, mobile devices...). And... Many thanks for sharing with us your reflections about this interesting topic! Belen |
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jgboticario |
Martyn, Belen, Personalisation in eLearning is a very interesting topic. Actually it's been a hot research issue over the last decade. Initially there were research prototypes for developing adaptive learning environments but more recent efforts are focused on providing general solutions focused on extending existing educational standards to support adaptive course delivery addressing students’ individual needs (Paramythis, Loidl-Reisinger and Kepler, 2004). In this respect, there have been two types of approaches. On the one hand there are those that provide intelligent solutions to cover different issues such as: intelligent testing (Guzmán, Conejo, Pérez-de-la-Cruz, 2007), capturing and analyzing student actions to create collaborative tutors (Harrer, McLaren, Walker, Bollen, and Sewall, 2006), rule-based adaptation with selection of stability (De Bra, Smits and Stash, 2006), authoring of adaptive hyperbooks (Murray, 2003), re-using educational activities through distributed servers (Brusilovsky, 2004a), dynamic course generation through AI planning techniques (Brusilovsky and Vassileva, 2003), etc. Furthermore, there have been several reviews that cover existing approaches (Brusilovsky, 1999; Cristea and Garzotto, 2004; Brusilovsky, 2004b). On the other hand, an alternative line of developments is to incorporate, through the usage of educational specifications and standards (IMS, SCORM), adaptive processes into modern large-scale web based education, where current learning management systems (LMS) are applied (Baldoni, Baroglio, Patti and Torraso, 2004; Boticario and Santos, 2006). In this respect, a question to be answered is how to construct LMS that support user-centered scenarios. Moreover, adaptation is not an idea that can be plugged in a particular system component, but a process that influences the full life cycle of learning. If we analyze current LMS, working on learning environments is a complex process of four interrelated steps: design of the learning experience (based on objectives, learning activities, resources and services), administration (i.e., management of all data including users’ roles, access rights and services configuration), usage (i.e., actual use of designed activities on the learning environment within the class context) and auditing (i.e., authors get reports on the actual use of course design, namely descriptions on how users have performed on learning activities, in order to adjust course design). Therefore, from the aforementioned definition of adaptation it is quite clear that to cope with the full life cycle of learning (i.e., from design to audit) we have to provide the authors with the required support to have a global and integrated perspective of LMS adaptive features. -------- All the above issues and their references are further discussed in what could be considered as a "background paper" for our research group (aDeNu), which is available at: http:/ Further we extended "the full life cycle of learning" to cope with accessibility and usability issues in another related paper (titled "Usability and Accessibility Evaluations along the eLearning Cycle"), which is available at: http:/ Nowadays we are progressing so that LMS will no longer be the main reference but just another component to be integrated in personalised learning environments (PLEs), Mashups and so on (e.g. Attwell et all, 2008). Attwell G. Barnes S.A., Bimrose J. and Brown A, (2008), Maturing Learning: Mashup Personal Learning Environments, CEUR Workshops proceedings, Aachen, Germany. A number of projects are of interest here: ROLE, iCAMP, GRAPPLE Cheers, Jesus
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jgboticario |
Belen, Within the aforementioned "background paper" there is a summary of the main findings from the user viewpoint. Cheers, Jesus |
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Belen |
Dear Jesus, With great interest I have read your article "Developing adaptive learning management systems." (Jesus G. Boticario and Olga C. Santos, http:/ However, when I said "users" in the previous post, I meant "people with functional diversity" (in the sense Wikipedia, http:/ In that sense, I read that you have been dealing with the use of the IMS-LD specification to support the psychopedagogical processes that should be provided to disabled students in universities. Any news about it? What is the opinion of the students with funtional diversity? I think that EU4ALL is just now dealing with this, not only the courses but the complete process, taking into account personalization and pedagogical and psychological issues. I read there is another article (Santos, O.C., Boticario, J.G., Campo, E., Saneiro, M. : "IMS-LD as a workflow to provide personalizad support for disabled students in higher education institutions. Workshop Towards User Modelling and Adaptive Systems for All." International Conference on User Modelling 2007) but maybe it is still in press...
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Olga |
Personalization in e-learning has several perspectives. So far in this discussion you have focused on the design time, that is, how some specifications (i.e. IMS-LD) can support the design of the adaptation requiremetns so they are taken into account during the runtime following the full life cycle of adaptation in e-learning that Jesus has introduced. |
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Daniel Burgos.ATOS |
Hi all, |
