Description
Common presence of information and communication technologies in our lives causes the expectation for education to be more flexible and adjustable. The project will support fulfilling such needs by creating the environment for individualized learning. The main objective is to carry out research that will support creating learning materials for Technology Enhanced Learning adapted to the learners needs and their learning preferences and transforming the way how such materials are delivered. The main outcome of the project will be a tool for defining individualized learning path. A formal language supporting precise description of the Learning Objects will be elaborated.The main beneficiary group will be instructional designers and producers of learning content. The results of the project could also be of interest to the teachers preparing the learning content on their own.
Summary of project results
Personalization is one of the main issues in contemporary education and intelligent adaptive learning systems are the tools designed to enable it. They can predict the learning preferences of a particular learner and adjust the learning content to them automatically. However availability of such systems may be limited by their price or language (for non-English speaking learners). The idea behind the INDIPATH project was to develop the solution that will support individualized learning and will be available for free. Therefore its main objective was to develop the methodology of describing the content of an online or blended course in a way that allows to match the learners profile and the activities that suit to it. Proposed E-learning Description Language (EDL) is the response to this objective. The course author, who wants to design an individualized course has to prepare 4 EDL files, that constitute the input for a selection algorithm, which role is to convert the “one size fits all” course into its individualized subset suitable for the particular learner. That algorithm - another output of the project - is an open source Moodle module. Additional outcomes, not previously planned, are: the interactive form, supporting the course author in creating 4 EDL files, and a brief guide on designing the individualized course using EDL. Both products are currently in Polish but It is planned to translate them into English as well. Up to now 2 teachers and 6 cohorts of learners (approx. 100 students) participated in individualized courses. It is planned to continue the experiment in the new academic year. Information about the project outcomes will be spread also during the conferences this Autumn and hopefully some other teachers will undertake the challenge. The interest already expressed by the potential beneficiaries when the project was presented both in Poland and abroad encourages the project team to continue their work.
Summary of bilateral results