Personalisation of Learning in Virtual Learning Environments

Abstract

Abstract. Personalization of learning has become a prominent issue in the educational field, at various levels. This article elaborates a different view on personalisation than what usually occurs in this area. Its baseline is that personalisation occurs when learning turns out to become personal in the learner's mind. Through a literature survey, we analyze constitutive dimensions of this inner sense of personalisation. Here, we devote special attention to confronting learners with tracked information. Making their personal interaction footprints visible contrasts with the back-office usage of this data by researchers, instructors or adaptive systems. We contribute a prototype designed for the Moodle platform according to the conceptual approach presented here.

The impact of user- and system-initiated personalization on the user experience at large sports events

“…The authors concluded that a hybrid combination of the user and system menus would be interesting future research. Verpoorten et al (2009), within a learning environment, also highlighted the support that user-initiated personalization provides for perceived controllability and self-efficacy.…”

“…Park et al (2007), Verpoorten et al (2009) -has focussed on relatively static information environments, where the contextual inputs used for system-initiated personalization may vary between users, but are relatively static for a specific individual. Therefore although this work can highlight the potential benefits of different personalization approaches, it may have limited applicability to a highly dynamic environment such as a large sports event, where the focus of attention is away from a mobile device, and there are scheduled and unscheduled temporal tensions (Tamminen et al, 2004).…”

“…Martinez et al, 2009;Verpoorten et al, 2009;Sun and May, 2013) have shown that both user-generated and system-generated personalization have benefits within specific usage environments. 'Usergenerated' and 'system-generated' personalization are roughly equivalent to the terms 'adaptable' and 'adaptive used in the user modelling literature -i.e either allowing users themselves to adapt content and layout to their preferences, or having a system undertake this automatically (Treiblmaier et al, 2004).…”

A case study for measuring Informal Learning in PLEs

“…In these initiatives a user might not decide which tools she is going to use and they will be limited to institutional decisions. Some initiatives in this scenario are: LMS defined for the integration of external tools [29], Google Wave Gadgets integrated into Moodle [30], PLE introducing tools based on log analysis [31], initiatives based on tools integration driven by learning design activities [32], integration architectures [33], etc. These initiatives have several problems such as: integration problems between tools, context integration difficulties and the customisation of student learning tools are constrained by the institution, etc.…”

Learning Management System with Prediction Model and Course-content Recommendation Module

“…Students or learners, just like customers or product consumers, are also in need of personalized recommendations for learning resources and activities that will match-up with their personal needs, preferences, prior knowledge, and current situation to facilitate an individualized learning or to offer a more personalized learning environment that will promote learning outcomes (Drachsler, Hummel & Koper, 2007;Verpoorten, Glahn, Kravcik, Ternier & Specht, 2009). This need is especially true in subjects that require higher levels of analytical and logical thinking skills, such as computer programming.…”