Enabling Learning Management Systems to Identify Learning Styles

Abstract

Learning management systems (LMS) are very successful in e-education but provide only little adaptivity. Adapting courses to the needs of individual learners such as to their learning styles improves the learning progress of learners. However, a requirement for providing adaptivity is to know the needs of learners. In this paper, we describe an approach that enables LMS to identify the learning styles from the behaviour of learners in online courses. Since our approach is developed for LMS in general, it incorporates that different LMS may provide different features, track different behaviour, and store the data based on different database schemata. In order to provide a practical example, we demonstrate how to enable the LMS Moodle to identify learning styles and describe which extensions had to be done.