Developing active learning experiences for adaptive personalised eLearning

Abstract

Developing adaptive, rich-media, cLearning 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. © Springer-Verlag 2004.