March 22, 2004

Group C


Vinnie joined our group, so we had a direct route into this question, although the discussion involved various group members.

Vinnie's question was "What might be the most useful axes of adaptivity for courses with which you are involved?"

that is, what elements of subject content can be adapted?

Some testing of students' prior knowledge (pre-test) of course content is just one element and might not / should not be the only or most dominant element.

Perhaps it's more to do with students' confidence than competence in an area?
Some self-rating of competence can be helpful.

One of the important axes is mode of communication: to have sufficient flexibility in the system to deliver in different ways, different modes of communication (query: students' learning styles - do we 'believe' in the theory of learning styles | in practice)?

The successful outcomes of the course and satisfaction levels may be as much derived from students' ownership/responsibility for the course and having choices within parameters - maybe this contributes more to success of the course than having material that suits a student's particular learning style?

We were reminded that the tutor's role is still important: there's a need to design the programme, not just do some kind of automated adaptive content retrieval

Appropriateness in this is combination of content/delivery package (my notes tail off at this point ... maybe someone else in the group can comment).

Posted by ilrt101v at March 22, 2004 05:24 PM