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Abstract.One of the major obstacles in developing quality eLearning content is the substantial development costs involved and development time required [12]. Educational providers, such as those in the university sector and corporate learning, are under increasing pressure to enhance the pedagogical quality and technical richness of their course offerings while at the same time achieving improved return on investment. One means of enhancing the educational impact of eLearning courses, while still optimizing the return on investment, is to facilitate the personalization and repurposing of learning objects across multiple related courses. However, eLearning courses typically differ strongly in ethos, learning goals and pedagogical approach whilst learners, even within the same course, may have different personal learning goals, motivations, prior knowledge and learning style preferences. This paper proposes an innovative multi-model approach to the dynamic composition and delivery of personalized learning utilizing reusable learning objects. The paper describes an adaptive metadata driven engine that composes, at runtime, tailored educational experiences across a single content base. This paper presents the theoretical models, design and implementation of the adaptive hypermedia educational service. This service is currently being successfully used for the delivery of undergraduate degree courses in Trinity College, Dublin as well as being used as part of a major EU research trial.

Abstract. The evaluation of learner and tutor feedback is essential in the production of high quality personalized eLearning services. There are few evaluations available in the Adaptive Hypermedia domain relative to the amount of research interest this domain is attracting. Many of the papers in this domain focus on the technological design of systems without justifying the designs through the lessons learned from evaluations. This paper evaluates the usability and effectiveness of using the multi-model, metadata-driven approach for producing rich adaptive eLearning solutions that remain content and domain independent. Through this independence, the eLearning services developed can utilize many pedagogical approaches and a variety of models to produce a wide range of highly flexible solutions. This paper identifies benefits to learners brought through adopting the multi-model approach gathered over four years of student evaluation. It briefly describes the evaluation of the Adaptive Personalized eLearning Service (APeLS), a personalized eLearning service based on a generic adaptive engine.

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Sedentary past‐times such as video gameplay are cited as having a negative effect on children's Fundamental Motor Skills (FMS) acquisition. Conversely, “exergames” utilise 3D sensor control systems (eg, Kinect®) to offer full body interactive user experiences in which FMS outputs are often part of the game “play” experience. This study evaluated the impact that participation in (1) commercial exergames and, (2) purpose‐built exergames had on user locomotor skill outcomes (run, hop, skip, jump and slide) when both sets of games were deployed with a “principled” human‐in‐the‐loop personalisation process. Typically developing children aged between 5 and 6 years were divided into two groups; a control group (n = 20; 45% girls) exposed to commercial exergames and, an experimental group (n = 20; 50% girls) exposed to purpose‐built exergames. Gameplay was delivered daily, in the classroom, over a period of 8 weeks. The Test of Gross Motor Development‐2 was utilised to assess children's locomotor skills at three time points (pre, interim and posttest). A mixed analysis of variance with repeated measures on time was conducted to evaluate results of the experimental group in comparison to the control group. A significant interaction effect was observed relating to Time × Group. Pairwise comparisons with a Bonferroni adjustment demonstrated that the experimental group made significant improvements for each locomotor skill (run, hop, skip, jump and slide) from pretest to posttest while the control group made significant improvements in only one locomotor skill (the slide) over the same timeframe. Results indicate that principled design and deployment of purpose‐built exergames support high quality locomotor outputs and, improved outcomes over time. What is already known about this topic A majority of modern children do not possess proficient locomotor skills and cannot hop, skip or even run properly Teachers typically target motor skills in the Physical Education setting but these skills require regular personalised practice to improve performance 3D sensor controlled exergames provide a potential platform to target locomotor skill acquisition in the classroom, but currently lack the necessary design principles to improve user locomotor skill outcomes What this paper adds A suite of “principled” exergames with adaptable features to target locomotor skills in the classroom A human‐in‐the‐loop deployment process that empowers the teacher to be a crucial component of the learning experience Empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of purpose‐built exergames for locomotor skill acquisition purposes in the classroom Implications for practice and/or policy Educators can work with a gaming system to effectively deploy “short bouts” of 3D sensor exergameplay in the classroom and facilitate significantly improved locomotor skills in children. Design and development of educational technology could consider the teacher as a valuable “human intelligent system” capable of making decisions about the user and user exper...

Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment

Abstract. The intrinsic motivation to play, and therefore to learn, that might be provided by digital educational games teases researchers and developers. However, existing educational games often fail in their attempt to compete with commercial games and to provide successful learning. Often some learning is added to digital games or some gameplay is added to educational applications. Successful education games, however, require merging professional game design with sound pedagogical strategies. This merge creates a new and hybrid format that truly deserves the denotation being a learning game. Moreover, a methodology is required that allows continuously balancing gaming and learning challenges and the learner's abilities and knowledge in order to retain an immersive gaming experience. In this article we introduce approaches to game design and didactic design, as well as a framework for adaptive interventions in educational games.

Developing adaptive, rich-media, eLearning courses tends to be a complex, highly-expensive and time-consuming task. A typical adaptive eLearning course will involve a multi-skilled development team of technologists, instructional developers, subject matter experts and integrators. Even where the adaptive course attempts to reuse existing digital resources, considerable effort is still required in the integration of the adaptive techniques and curriculum. This paper tackles the fundamental challenges of extending adaptivity across not only content (based on prior knowledge, goals, learning styles, connectivity etc.) but also across adaptive pedagogic approaches, communication tools and a range of e-activity types which are required for effective, deeper learning. This paper identifies key activities and requirements for adaptive course construction and presents the design of a tool to allow the rapid construction of such courses. The paper outlines the usage of this tool in the form of a case study and presents its research findings.