March 22, 2004

Can technology learn from the learners themselves?, Vincent Wade

The idea that technology can learn from and adapt to the learners themselves, is increasingly being proposed in various forms: Personalised eLearning, Contextualised eLearning, eLearning 'just for you'. ELearning technology is emerging which claims to be capable of customising educational strategy, dynamically composing educational resource/content, reshaping presentations and user interfaces, and adapting communication & collaboration tools, to suit the individual learner or groups of learners. A typical problem addressed by such systems has been the 'one size fits all’ delivery of elearning content, which can lead to various problems including lack of relevance, motivation (intrinsic), inflexibility, lack of choice of learning strategy etc. In Personalised eLearning the learning experience can be adapted to several aspects of the learning e.g. current goals, expertise, learning history, learning style or physical context (access device availabilities and capabilities, connection quality, mobility etc).

A second aspect of such adaptivity is the promise of much greater reusability of resources across different audiences and potentially different curricula.

In this discussion we shall explore the capabilities, limitations and possible implications of this form of eLearning. Some questions we may address include:

  • Is this really going to benefit the learner or is it just more clever marketing?
  • What new flexibilities and potentials does this offer the learner and tutor?
  • What sort of strategies can be used to harness such adaptive behaviour whilst maintaining the overall curricula objectives and integrity?
  • Is this yet-more-complexity?
  • What is the difference between this and the old 'intelligent tutoring system' (which had very limited impact elearning practice)?
  • Can this really be done in budget, on time and without a team of dedicated software engineers?
  • Is this approach limited to ‘content delivery’ or can it be used more imaginatively?
  • Group adaptivity versus individual personalisation?
Posted by price at March 22, 2004 03:15 PM