An Adaptive Mechanism for Enhancing e-Learning

E-learning and so-called learning management systems (LMSs) are increasingly used by educational institutions such as universities. While LMSs aim at supporting teachers in creating and holding online courses, they typically do not consider the individual differences of learners. However, learners have different needs and characteristics such as prior knowledge, motivation, cognitive traits, and learning styles. In addition, educational theories argue that considering individual characteristics of learners such as learning styles in the learning process has high potential to make learning easier for learners and increase their learning progress. This project focuses on incorporating learning styles in LMSs and aims at designing, implementing, and evaluating an adaptive mechanism which enables LMSs to provide students with courses that fit their individual learning styles. In order to achieve this goal, three research issues needs to be addressed. Providing adaptivity requires knowing the learning styles of learners. Therefore, an advanced student modelling approach will be developed which uses information about the students` behaviour and actions from different components and services in an LMS in order to identify learning styles, store them in the student model, and frequently update them. Due to combining automatic, static, dynamic, and global aspects of student modelling, the approach becomes more accurate and reliable, and allows updating and improving the information in the student model frequently as well as identifying and responding to changes in the students` learning styles. Furthermore, the project aims at making the adaptive mechanism generic in terms of allowing teachers to specify which types of learning objects shall be considered for providing adaptivity. Therefore, teachers can adapt the mechanism in a way that they can use their already available courses as adaptive ones rather than developing them again from scratch. Moreover, a module will be developed which composes adaptive courses, integrating the student modelling approach and the generic framework of the adaptive mechanism. In order to consider the dynamic aspects of student modelling, the adaptive mechanism is interacting with students regarding modifications in the adaptive courses. The proposed adaptive mechanism aims at making learning easier for students by providing them with courses that fit their individual learning styles. Furthermore, the mechanism aims at being easy to use for teachers, letting them continue using their already available courses in LMSs by allowing adjusting the mechanism to the characteristics of the respective courses in order to provide them as adaptive ones.