Common sense-based applications to advance personalized learning

Abstract

Learning process varies according to learners' profiles and cultural contexts in which they are inserted. In order to provide effective learning, educators should contextualize the learning process to their learners' needs from the planning of learning activities, i.e. a group of tasks with educational purpose, to the elaboration of learning content that they will use. This is a way to provide personalized learning to different groups of learners, one of the grand challenges for engineering research in the 21 st century. This paper proposes the use of common sense knowledge for developing computer applications to support educators in contextualizing the learning process to their learners' reality by the analysis of common sense knowledge collected from people with the same profile of the learners. It presents the solutions of OMCS-Br for collecting and using common sense knowledge into computer applications and three educational applications developed for the purpose of helping educators with personalized learning.

Domain-specific textual commonsense concept acquisition using a corpus

“…The experiment used κ co-efficient and Kendall's τ values to measure concordance strength among nominal variables [10] [11] that are particularly important to acquire domainindependent knowledge. There are several look-alike commonsense concept tools like Cog-Learn [12] and Cognitor [13]. These tools identify commonsense knowledge from text using textual concept maps [14].…”

Designing for Culturally Contextualized Learning Activity Planning: Matching Learning Theories and Practice

“…To decide on topics that should be approached during the LA, so that the LA fits the students' needs. 2 To decide the degree of detail with which each topic should be approached.…”

“…teachers and students, is very important to allow the development of tools that can successfully support the educational process. For instance, in order to effectively support education, it is important to take into account pedagogical issues surrounding it in the development of learning technology, so that the developed solution can help teachers to put in practice such issues [1,2].…”

“…Considering that common sense knowledge is part of the cognitive structure of all students, the planning of the learning tasks can be directed so that meaningful learning can take place. More details of how common sense can support these two Learning Theories and the others previously mentioned can be found in [2].…”

Filling out learning object metadata considering cultural contextualization

“…Regarding the learning process, there are several learning theories on how learning takes place and how teachers should address it. Among those theories, the use of common sense knowledge to contextualize the learning process to the student's cultural reality [14] [15] and the use of Conceptual Maps (CM) to organize the learning content which is presented to students [18] emerge as important practices that can help elearning to be successful [5]. In this context, common sense knowledge can be defined as a non-specialized kind of knowledge that describes the culture of a social group in a specific era [18].…”