Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
An interesting project is ROLE (ROLE, 2009),
which aims at developing and testing prototypes
of high responsive, open learning environments,
offering breakthrough levels of effectiveness, flex-
ibility, user-control and mass-individualization.
Such learning environments are supposed to
advance the state-of-the-art in human resource
management, self-regulated and social learning,
adaptive education and educational psychology,
service composition and orchestration, and the
use of ICT in lifelong learning. Learning envi-
ronment elements can be combined in ROLE to
generate i.e. to mash-up) new components and
functionalities, which can be adapted by lone
learners or collaborating learners to meet their
own needs and to enhance the effectiveness of
their learning. However ROLE does not consider
any semantic relation between users, contents
and tools when supports the construction of user-
centered services.
In addition, the framework that has been intro-
duced can be applied in different settings such as
curriculum based and vocational education and not
just in those presented at HE institutions. In par-
ticular, it is well known that learners with special
needs in those contexts encounter difficulties with
basic academic tasks such as reading and writing.
These learners share some learning difficulties
when they are accessing both learning contents
and services. In general they have information
processing problems and due to some limitations in
various cognitive processes (memory, reasoning,
attention, language understanding) they perform
poorly on the target tasks. They usually miss
relevant information for problem solving in the
academic and real world context. Thus they may
benefit from having extra time for assessment and
other activities, supporting in text comprehension
and writing and scheduling/organizer functions.
To this end we have already developed a
psycho-educational support prototype that com-
bines different framework modules (i.e. learning
design, user modelling, recommender system and
the LMS) to provide personalized learning flows
according to the student learning style, psycho-
educational needs, knowledge and competences
(Rodriguez-Ascaso et al, 2008a). The basic idea
behind that is to support the student with additional
information and guidance when dealing with learn-
ing tasks. The student accesses additional content
(in audio /video format, etc), which is presented
according to their context and interaction needs
(thanks to the Content Personalization, Metadata
Repository and Device Models Repository), in
order to help them to complete the scheduled
tasks. When the expectations are not met the
Recommender System provides the learner with
new recommendations and if they do not suffice,
either the tracker informs the tutor/advisor/coun-
sellor who takes over. The open issue here is not
the applicability of the solutions included in the
framework but the technological infrastructure
required to do so. The challenge in these settings
(i.e. curriculum based and vocational education)
is mainly an innovation issue. Hopefully the shifts
of learning paradigms, the new delivery modes
(mainly ICT mediated) and the increasing number
of driving forces (e.g. the labour market) will
promote the application of this type of solutions
in these settings (Carneiro, 2007).
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Future research directions should focus on fa-
cilitating the management of the teaching and
learning processes themselves in an accessible,
personalized and standards-based way, not just
the contents to be learned. Several technological
and management problems should be addressed
in order to guarantee a personalized task based
learning approach, manage flexible and ubiquitous
scenarios and support long-term modelling and
profiling. Several issues are involved to guaran-
tee the personalized and inclusive approach: (i)
responsiveness of the environment, (ii) addressing
different approaches from individual to collab-
orative learning, from desktop management to
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