Enhancing adaptivity in moodle: Framework and evaluation study

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a framework that can be used to embed an adaptivity mechanism to Moodle so as to achieve better learning results. This mechanism adapts the presentation and the proposed navigation within a course, to students’ different learning preferences as they are expressed by their leaning styles and their educational objectives. An evaluation study was conducted in the context of an introductory programming course in order to examine the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism and students’ feedback on it. Two groups of students were formed, namely the experimental and the control group. The first had access to a Moodle course that exploited the adaptivity mechanism, whereas the second had access to the standard version of a Moodle course. The results were encouraging since they indicated that our extension affected students’ motivation and performance while their feedback about its usability was positive.