Open Learning Environments for Personalized Learning -

Open Learning Environments for Personalised Learning


Stefanie Klein and Volker Zimmermann (IMC)

imc information multimedia communication AG, www.im‐c.com

Abstract

Personalisation is a key requirement to motivate learners to use learning technologies and self‐paced content. Whereas most research focuses on the personalisation of content, this paper takes a closer look at the personalisation of the tools and platform technologies for learning and the use of open learning content within that context. When designing a learning environment, most organisations tend to work on their internal business processes and content instead of focussing on what the learners really do with the learning tools the organisation provides to them. Changing the perspective to the users shows that they prefer to create their own technology‐enhanced learning environments and choose to individually adapt contents to their needs – not necessarily within the organisational structures and solutions offered to them. Doing this, a whole set of technologies comes into play: Suddenly the organisational learning management system has to be compatible with a variety of social network platforms, search engines, open web services, blogs or wikis, open content repositories and a high number of other applications. Thus, the challenge for organisations today is: How can they manage the variety of technologies and simultaneously foster the creativity and motivation of their users. This paper proposes a solution for this question by describing an architecture for an open learning environment. It delivers examples and instructions on how to build such a solution step‐by‐step. The presented approach is equally relevant for public institutions, corporation or educational institutions.

Keywords

Personal Learning Environment, Learning Management, Adaptive Learning, e‐Learning, Mashup Technologies, Learning Architecture

1 Introduction

Ever since the times of Sidney Pressey, who was first to use “intelligent” machines for educational purposes in 1926 (Pressey, 1926), and Benjamin Bloom (Bloom, 1984), who argued that the most effective way of teaching is one‐on‐one tutoring, the idea of personalised tutoring has been in the focus of psychological, pedagogical, and didactic theory and practise, particularly with respect to technology‐enhanced learning. Intelligent and adaptive educational systems have attempted to support the learner and the teacher by providing meaningful, relevant, and appropriate educational content. Over the past years, research and development in the area of intelligent and adaptive educational systems has made significant progress and the evolution of such technology – including their psycho‐pedagogical foundations – proceeds continuously. In the context of existing approaches to

intelligent and adaptive learning, adaptivity refers to personalised presentation of contents and adaptive navigation through the contents.

One crucial aspect of personalisation and adaptation to the learners, their preferences and needs is largely untouched by current educational technology: the personalisation of the entire learning environment, its components, tools and functionalities. The broad range of different demands and the dynamics of demands over time ultimately require such innovative approaches to adaptivity and adaptability. Additionally, an appropriate balance between system controlled, self‐controlled, and peer/teacher‐controlled environments contributes to that requirement.

Moreover, there is a significant change – a “perfect storm” (Vice‐Chancellor of the UK Open University) happening in the field of educational technology which is essentially driven by an increased use of learning management systems in corporate as well as higher education environments but also by today’s web 2.0 developments which allow learners more than before to create their own content (e.g. WIKIs).

The pattern is characterised by a shift from "push for learning" (the dominance of organisation‐driven learning models) to "pull for learning" (a learner‐driven demand for informal and lifelong learning, in which learners control what they learn, how they learn it, and with whom).

Simple peer‐to‐peer networks between virtual learning environments (VLE) have not solved these questions in the past. There is a need to enable the learner to combine the services in his/her personal learning environment (either on social network technologies or within collaboration and portal platforms). This implies that in future LMSs have to control the processes in such a way that the learner can adapt and personalise his own scenario in combination with web 2.0 technologies and other learning resources (e.g. open content).

This is of particular relevance in critical lifelong learning transition phases when inhomogeneous groups of learners are treated in a one‐size‐fits‐all way since there is no way to respond to their individual strengths and weaknesses. Even worse, in such transition phases learners are typically required to become accustomed to working with an entirely new VLE.

One of the main questions is how to enable the individual learner as well as groups of learners to adapt the learning environment to their very specific needs and, more importantly, how to enable the system to adapt its functionalities and components to the very specific and individual demands.

And yet, there is a need to go even a step further beyond such novel perspectives on personalisation and adaptation in educational technology. In the future, it is necessary to enable the individual learner or groups of learners to generate new components and functionalities on the basis of existing web based software tools, so‐called web services.

This vision is quite ambitious. On one hand, the technological implementation must allow ‘non‐technicians’ to generate new tools and functionalities. This necessarily implies the

need for research regarding adaptive learner support for service composition and orchestration of adaptive tools (what may be called meta‐responsiveness). While the so‐called “digital natives” are utilising many aspects of technology to support their learning, technologically inexperienced learners, which is by far the largest group, need suitable support. On the other hand, technological research and development must be based on psycho‐pedagogical theories of intelligent and adaptive education, learning psychology, and sound didactic principles and strategies. Moreover, aspects of self‐regulated learning must be explicitly considered in this context.

In this document we will discuss the development of a generic framework, which provides adaptivity and personalisation of the entire learning environment and its functionalities.

From a technical point of view, such a framework does not have to unite all learning tools and technologies in one infrastructure. The vision is to combine the best features of virtual learning environments in one ‘bundle’, i.e. a Responsive Open Learning Environment. A learning management system will act as the anchor for the different components, it must allow the integration of external services via so‐called web services. Vice versa the LMS must be designed in such a way that it allows its services to be integrated into other platforms such as corporate collaboration portals or social network platforms.

2 Background

2.1 Learning Technologies

Taking a look at today’s technologies used to build a virtual learning environment, a large variety of different software systems and components are being used depending on the learning processes organisations aim to support. Figure 1 contains the most important software tools and platform components.

Learning ProcessManagementResourceManagementLearningContent Management Authoring ToolsVirtual ClassroomTraining andEvent ManagementSkill&CompetencyManagementLearning DesignToolsPerformanceManagementTest and AssessmentToolsSocialSoftware Tools(Blogs, WIKIs, RSS,SocialBookmarking)Open ContentRepositoriesandCommunitiesLearningManagementSystem

Figure 1: Technologies within a Personal Learning Environment

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are the core in a modern virtual learning environment (Grohmann et al., 2007). They take over the role of integrating the different technologies into a common learning environment. LMSs primarily focus on the management of learning and training processes, distributing the learning content, supporting the learning process, and serving as general communication point and interface between learner and teacher (Helic, 2006). Using an LMS, the organisation collects data to enable decisions, to fulfil compliance needs and to manage efficient training processes. No other technology allows a teacher to support learners in such a structured, systematic way, driven by learning objects (Kraemer et al., 2007).

Today’s LMSs offer content management and learning process technologies. Content management functionalities enable an organisation to administer a large scale of different learning objects, to group them into different courses or learning settings. Process management functionalities allow the organisation to manage the workflows and business processes such as booking of courses, notifications to inform learners and teachers about events or learning activities, setting up a syllabus and run training programmes.

Virtual classroom tools support activities of synchronous learning like sharing of workspaces and resources as well as live discussions between participants. Authoring tools allow to create and to publish content using standard technology to integrate the result of the creation process into the platforms (e.g. SCORM). Test and assessment systems allow creating exercises, to integrate them into tests and to run tests in order to proof the knowledge and certify people for a specific knowledge level.

From an organisational perspective there are many additional components which complement a learning environment. Training and event management systems support the management of onsite training events, resource management systems help to optimise the resources needed in training processes, skill and competency management systems allow to administer the skills of an organisation’s workforce and performance management systems help to track and improve the performance of participants.

Collaborative, social and informal learning plays an increasingly important role within a virtual learning environment. WIKIs, blogs, search functionalities, RSS feeds, etc. support learners by helping them to share and create knowledge, either within a course or in a self‐organised form. Social networking systems and open content platforms support the exchange of information, knowledge and learning objects, they interlink people and create networks of common interest. Either these objects are stand‐alone technologies in the web 2.0, integrated through mashups or they are an integral part of an LMS.

A modern Personal Learning Environment (PLE) can be built based on the technology of an LMS using integration technologies. Modern LMSs allow a natural and learner‐centric approach and are characterised by the freeform use of a set of lightweight services and tools. Such a VLE (virtual learning environment) or PLE (personal learning environment) driven approach does not only provide personal spaces, which belong to and are controlled by the user, but also creates a social context by offering means to connect with other people for effective knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation (Chatti et al., 2007).

Despite their popularity, LMSs are criticised for their focus on supporting learning management, which often results in behavioural approaches to learning (Schulmeister, 2002). But – as explained above – the integration of social learning technology has proven, that this is not applicable anymore.

2.2 Collaboration in Learning Communities

Success stories for the use of learning technologies are often based on large‐scale approaches. New trends in learning, subsumed with the term web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) and known to the public due to large user communities or strong media attention, have already started to influence technology‐enhanced learning (Rollett et al., 2007; Ullrich et al., 2008) through their ability to motivate the learners to participate more actively (Vassileva, 2002; Kamel, Boulos & Wheeler, 2007). Educational experts such as Downes (Downes, 2005) see significant potential for web 2.0 in education. Recently, researchers have been focusing on how to incorporate these new trends into the learning processes and how to harness and web 2.0 concepts to create new experiences for learners. Aiming at a more active

involvement of learners current web 2.0 driven learning technologies focus on the perspective of learners, allowing them to individually design their learning environments, giving them full control over the learning environment, supporting communication and collaboration with others (Moedritscher & Wild, 2008).

Collaborative learning can be a powerful instrument for achieving an active learner involvement (Dillenbourg et al., 1995), e.g. by promoting reflective interactions (Baker & Lund, 1997). However, existing pedagogical frameworks are expert‐driven, which conflicts with the learner‐driven paradigm of web 2.0 (Ullrich et al., 2008).

3 Towards an open learning architecture

When changing the perspective from the organisation to the user, the picture changes as follows: A user creates “his/her own world of learning” based on what he/she will be offered from his organisation, what is available in the web and what input he/she receives from other institutions – such as from a training centre where he/she participates in a course. This perspective is difficult to plan for organisations, there is not one solution to be found, there are many – there are as many as there are learners.

Figure 2 describes this situation by presenting a possible scenario from a user perspective. In this scenario, the corporate learning is managed by an LMS which might contain various tools and technologies as described above. In addition, the company provides a corporate blogsphere for learning and a repository with documents that contains relevant knowledge such as slides, PDF documents, etc. But the user also attends a training course at an external educational institution, which runs its own LMS. So the user has access to this second LMS – which may be a different one than the corporate LMS – and may have to follow a new learning logic or to apply different tools and didactics. Besides these LMS based activities within the company and the educational institution, the user has decided to employ web tools available to the public: search engines to retrieve relevant contents, social networking platform to share experiences or just to chat with other learners. These web tools include an open content repository to share slides and other learning materials.

Figure 2: Example of a user’s learning world

This scenario illustrates how diverse the “real” learning world of a user might be. It is just an example but it reflects the situation that most learners face today.

It is not realistic anymore to assume that organisational learning will take place within one single system – this concept is no longer applicable. In a responsive open learning architecture, the challenge will be to support the “new” world of learning described in our scenario. Learning technologies must be adapted to the needs of users in order to enable organisations to continuously manage and control learning processes while simultaneously offering spaces for creative and flexible social learning.

Therefore, the design of an open learning environment has to adhere to the principles of personalisation with regards to

•

the adaptation of learning processes,

•

an intelligent content selection and sequencing,

•

skill management as well as

•

focussed teaching.

Figure 3 shows an architecture for a responsive open learning environment. This environment has to be customisable by the user him‐/herself. The user is responsible for the selection of appropriate learning services, however, the system should provide recommendations on how to combine these services.

Figure 3: Architecture of a responsive open learning environment

In order to set up such an environment each component – such as LMS, library system, community platform or open content repository ‐ must offer web services or widgets, that allow the component to be integrated into an open platform (e.g. Facebook, iGoogle) or corporate portal (e.g. SAP Netweaver, MS Sharepoint) using the interface technology of the respective portal/platform. The key element in this architecture is a personalisation service or engine that combines these independent services logically by using meta data (competency data, learner preferences).

Taking a closer look at interface technologies the most popular way for the integration of services would be via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs represent today’s state‐of‐the art interface technology, but as a basic premise for the application of APIs the services to be integrated have to be developed in the same programming language. Thus over the past years more flexible ways to combine services gained importance. Web services based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer) architectures attracted specific attention. In SOAP architectures WSDL (Web Service Definition Language) is used as a language to describe interfaces. It enables other services to detect ways in which a given service can be contacted. REST is a more simple way to connect web services, complex requests are encoded in call parameters which need to be agreed upon by the developers of the services being connected.

Unfortunately both SOAP and REST architectures lack in semantics, but semantic data is needed to combine services in an intelligent way. Recently SA‐REST, a very promising standard, has been developed. Its design makes it possible to integrate REST based services with little or no programming efforts required.

Figure 4 shows an example, how an open content repository (SLIDESTAR) and an LMS can be integrated into Facebook using widget technology. We can expect that open learning environments like the one illustrated in our example will be a standard in the future.

Figure 4: Sample Open Learning Environment

Having explained the technical architecture, the remaining question is: how can organisations build such an open learning environment. Our recommendation would be to do this step‐by‐step from “inside to outside”. Figure 5 illustrates the proposed procedure.

Figure 5: Roadmap to an open learning environment

In the first step, an organisation should build an internal learning platform on the basis of an LMS which leads to efficient training processes. This technical basis is needed as it allows to track learners’ progress or to provide internal e‐learning and blended learning programmes. The next step should be to implement various content technologies and content repositories which shall help to create access channels to learning resources. Once this step has been completed, the learners should be offered tools to their own content, to collaborate and share learning experiences. Up to this third step, the learning still takes place internally. Therefore, the fourth step is to open the solution towards social network communities and platforms via widgets and mash‐up technologies.

4 Conclusion

To personalise learning environments we need to have a closer look at the adaptation of learning processes, an intelligent content selection and sequencing, a personalised competence and skill management as well as focussed teaching. Innovative learning environments have to be based on mass‐personalisation approaches enabling every learner to easily design and maintain his/her own personal learning environment (PLE) consisting of an individual mix of preferred learning tools, learning services and resources. Thus, the level of self‐control and responsibility of learners will be strengthened, which is seen as a key motivation aspect and success factor of self‐paced, formally instructed as well as informal/social learning.

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