Diplek: An Open LMS that Supports Fast Composition of Educational Services - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 64

in order to transform it to a suitable form. Besides,
transforming a Learning Object from its original
format to a compatible LMS format entails the
risk of affecting negatively its educational value.
A LMS should provide the instructor with tools
to include/present educational material in any
possible format, as long as it can be rendered in
the learners' computer.

basic elements of the communication service
group offered by most LMS.

Adaptation and Profile Building

Adaptation is used to refer to the personalization
of learning based on user preferences and user
performance along specific criteria. The two
main aspects usually involved are adaptivity and
adaptability. Adaptivity is defined as the ability to
change a lesson using different parameters and a
set of pre-defined rules. On the other hand, adapt-
ability is the possibility for learners to personalize
a lesson by themselves. (Burgos, Tattersall &
Koper, 2007 )
A user profile can be built based on the user's
behaviour, the educational content viewed, or
both. A human behaviour based user model can
be learned by observing the user's actions such
as log files, recording service, etc (Kim & Chan,
2008). Building a user profile can be done both
manually by the instructor and automatically (e.g.
using autonomous agents).

Evaluation and Assessment

Gronlund (2006) has written that formative as-
sessment is intended “to monitor student progress
during instruction...to identify the students' learn-
ing successes and failures so that adjustments in
instruction and learning can be made”. Tests and
assignments constitute a large part of a learner's
everyday educational practice. Instructors are re-
sponsible for checking a learner's progress through
the course duration and one of the tools at hand
is test assignment. When it comes to a LMS, this
is offered as a built-in service that makes use of
a large variety of tools available to assist both the
instructors and learners. These tools range from
supporting authoring of multiple choice questions
up to project (assignments) management.

Learner Monitoring

LMS gather large logs of data of learners' ac-
tivities during courses and usually have built-in
monitoring features that enable the instructors
to view some statistical data, such as a learner's
frequency of login, time taken on a course or a
test, the number of messages the learner has read
or sent, marks achieved in tests, etc.
Instructors may use this information to moni-
tor the learner's progress and to identify potential
problems. However, tracking data is usually
provided in a tabular format, is often incompre-
hensible, with a poor logical organization, and
is difficult to follow. As a result, Web log data
is used by only few skilled and technically ad-
vanced distance learning instructors. (Mazza &
Dimitrova, 2007)

Communication and Collaboration

Communication in a computer learning environ-
ment can be analyzed in the broader context
of computer-supported collaborative learning
(CSCL) (Weinberger & Fischer, 2006). This field
deals with issues regarding collaboration during
the learning processes, and the use of computer-
mediated communication (CMC) to support col-
laboration between learners, in order to enhance
learners' learning processes (Kreijns, Kirschner &
Jochems, 2003). This group of services is regarded
as a fundamental part of the learning process.
Communication in a LMS can be implemented
by using emails, built in messaging-chat services,
forums, wikis and blogs. These services are the