Advances in Web‐Based Education: Personalized Learning Environments

Citation

Barker, P. (2007), "Advances in Web‐Based Education: Personalized Learning Environments", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 120-121. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710729218

The worldwide web (WWW) and other web‐based technologies have become powerful vehicles for the support of teaching and learning in a variety of different contexts. These can include both group learning situations and individualised learning environments. This book is devoted to the latter category. In particular, it discusses the wide range of factors that influence the design, creation and application of personalised web‐based learning environments. Such environments are able to adapt educational content, navigational support, assessment and feedback in a variety of different ways in order to accommodate an individual learner's needs. Essentially, the book describes how considerations of users and pedagogy can be successfully integrated with a view to creating effective personalised learning environments through the use of adaptive hypermedia systems. The book contains 14 contributions from a collection of 30 different authors from a range of different countries. The various chapters are organised into four basic theme areas. These relate to the following broad topics:

1. 1.

   modelling learners;

2. 2.

   designing instruction;

3. 3.

   authoring and exploring content; and

4. 4.

   approaches to integration.

The five chapters that make up the first part of the book are devoted to issues related to various aspects of modelling users. This topic is important because, in personalised learning environments, learner modelling is the fundamental mechanism that is used to personalise the interaction that takes place between the system and each individual member of the target population of learners. Particular topics that are discussed in this section include gender effects, modelling cognitive ability, dominant meanings (in search queries and results), probabilistic predictive modelling and giving students control of adaptivity.

The second part of the book (“Designing instruction”) contains four contributions. These are concerned with the use of different instructional approaches to support adaptation within personalised learning environments. The topics that are described and discussed in this section of the book include:

• •

  the use of mixed‐initiative approaches to controlling instructional interaction;

• •

  the development of a methodology for supporting adaptive instructional design (called “MAID”);

• •

  the use of a web‐based concept mapping tool (called “COMPASS”); and

• •

  the application of adaptive navigation metaphors within SCORM compliant learning modules. (Note: SCORM is an acronym for ‘Shareable Content Object Reference Model’; further details of the SCORM standards can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORM.)

The three chapters that make up the third part of the book discuss authoring techniques and content exploration. More specifically, the first two chapters in this section deal with two different approaches to content development. The first of these introduces a “Layered WWW Adaptive Hypermedia System Authoring Model and its corresponding Algebraic Operators” (LAOS) and an implementation of it called “My Online Teacher”. The second approach to authoring is based on a system called “AHyCo” (Adaptive Hypermedia Courseware); this uses intuitive form‐based interfaces to enable teachers (who are not information technology specialists) to develop complex hypermedia content. The final contribution to this section describes a system called “Text‐Col” for reading electronic texts in an active (as opposed to a passive) way. It does this by allowing readers to change the appearance of text based on different strategies for categorising words.

The final part of the book is by far the shortest and contains just two chapters. Each of these deals with the complex issues of integration. Two broad perspectives are covered. In the first of these, a “Learning Agent module” is used; this employs semantic assessment and learner modelling as a means of providing adaptive content and adaptive scaffolding for learners. The second approach integrates adaptation techniques, ubiquitous computing and recent developments in mobile learning in order to provide support for contextualised learning.

This is an interesting book that makes a useful contribution to knowledge in the fields of intelligent tutoring systems, student modelling and web‐based instruction. Many of the contributions in this book contain details of significant developments that could find useful application within numerous other areas of electronic learning. This text would therefore make very useful reading for anyone involved in research and development within the sphere of e‐learning.