Social, Personalized Lifelong Learning - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 100

A SOCIAL REFERENCE
FRAMEWORK FOR
ADAPTIVE E-LEARNING

about her progress, instead of going through the
official channels. She 'asks' the system to recom-
mend someone, and the system finds student Jane
for her, who has just finished the item related to
'Banking crises'. Mary then contacts Jane, who is
willing to move on to a chat tool to give her some
direct guidance, and maybe to gain a new friend.
Requirements : the system should allow per-
sonalization of material (items in a module) to a
learner, and recommendations of 'expert students' 2

The Social Personalized Adaptive
Lifelong Learning Scenarios

To illustrate the type of adaptation that can be
expected in the new framework, we present five
social, personalized, adaptive lifelong learning
scenarios using SLAOS (Social LAOS). The first
scenario, “Help! I'm lost”, explains the situation of
a student helping another student. The second sce-
nario, “A group project”, represents the case of the
system balancing workload between students. The
third scenario, “I am done. What now?”, explains
how the system might recommend reading mate-
rial or another project for an individual student.
In the fourth scenario the system recommends a
better group for the current student, and in the
fifth it recommends content to an author. These
scenarios are by no means intended to be exhaus-
tive, and they can be extended with other typical
lifelong learning situations. The scenarios below
are used as running examples, to introduce later
the Social LAOS framework and its definitions,
and are also related to the screenshots presented
in the implementation section.

Scenario 2: A Group Project

Students Mary and Jane (a previously full-time
mother who is planning to return to work and is
upgrading her CV) later participate in a group
project 'writing an essay on theories of Financial
crises' (thus they need to author a module with
topics such as those illustrated in Figure 5). It's a
three-person project, so after the two register for
it, the system recommends another student, Bob
(a company worker aiming at climbing up the
management ladder), as a third person, who had
registered earlier looking for partners for the same
project. The activities associated with the work
are: Internet search for 'Marxist theories' (15% of
workload), Internet search for 'Minsky's theory'
(15%), Internet search for 'Models and Games'
(10%), Essay Writing (50%), and Essay Revision
(10%). Jane loves writing, so she decides that she
will take Essay Writing. Mary then decides that
her strength is in browsing, so she takes over all
browsing activities. Bob is new in the partnership,
so he accepts the remaining revision activity.
However, after they log in their initial preferences,
the system notices the big discrepancies in their
workloads, and thus advises the students to share
the load in a more equal manner. Consistent with
the initial preferences, the system encourages
Bob to take over some part of the writing and
searching activities together with the essay revi-
sion. Similarly, Jane is advised to keep up to an
equivalent workload of 33-34% of writing activity.
Finally, Mary is advised to reduce one or more

Scenario 1: Help! I'm Lost

Mary is a hairdresser and a part-time student of
Economics. She is following lessons on an on-
line system with social support, adaptation and
personalization, based on SLAOS. She is stuck
on the topic of 'Banking crises' (see a snapshot in
Figure 4, left hand menu). The system could rec-
ommend her to contact a specific teacher, or some
customized reading material (modules or items,
such as in Figure 4, where 'Strategic complemen-
tarities in financial markets' is recommended for
a student reading about 'Speculative bubbles and
crashes'). She is however a very social student,
and would prefer to chat with another student