Session F2C 3DE: AN ENVIRONMENT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNER-CENTERED CUSTOM EDUCATIONAL PACKAGES Dante Del Corso1 , Emanuela Ovcin2 , Gaetano Morrone3 , Dimitri Gianesini4 , Sari Salojarvi5 , and Tanja Kvist 6 Abstract The usual approach for interactive multimedia courses is to build teacher or institution-driven ‘commodity’ courses. Better results can be achieved with courses customized for the requirements and needs of each learner. This is the approach of 3DE (Design, Development and Delivery - Electronic Environment for Educational Multimedia), a project aimed to define, design, and build personalized learning packages, tailor-made for individual learners. These Custom Courses are built from a library of micromodules worked out specifically for different learning styles. The goals are to improve the effectiveness of computer-based teaching and training packages, and to reduce the cost for the development of high-quality interactive multimedia educational packages, thanks to reuse of micromodules and the automated course assembly procedures. The environment include tools to analyze learning style preferences, competence, and educational the goals in terms of final competence and skills. Index Terms Automated construction, personalized learning, reuse of parts, educational effectiveness.
INTRODUCTION The high development and production costs of interactive Multimedia educational material forces to build courses for large groups of learners. This brings to teacher or institutiondriven ‘commodity’ courses, designed to fit the needs of a wide community of users. Development tools for such learning packages are already available on the market; they take into account mostly the requirements of the learning organisation (companies, university), rather than learners’ personal need. The educational platforms and repositories of educational material available today do not allow to choose the learning path which will really suite the needs of the learner and allow him to reach the desired learning goals. This lack of optimisation towards individual learners reduces their efficiency. The new challenge is to take care of the diversity of the learners – their competencies and knowledge attitudes. Learning material must be classified not only for the content, but also for the way in which the content is
presented. As learners do learn in different ways, also teachers teach with different methods, but this is usually not considered in the development of support material. 3DE, acronym of Design, Development and Delivery Electronic Environment for Educational Multimedia [1], is a research project within the European Union IST Vth Framework Programme [2] carried out by a consortium of 4 partners: COREP (Italy), ARDEMI (France), STI (Spain), Polytechnic of Vaasa (Finland). The goal of the 3DE project is to define, design, build, and make usable a development environment for interactive educational MultiMedia packages able to build, in an automated or guided way, courses customised for the needs of each learner. These will achieve higher effectiveness thanks to the improvements in the pedagogical design and in learner-centered customization. Courses are built from a library of ‘micromodules’ - logically indivisible learning units - in an automated way, taking into account the specification of final educational/training goals and the results of learner’s competence/ preference analysis. Several different custom packages can be built from the same pool of micro-modules. Basically, the teacher-learner relations is changed from the 1-to-N paradigm (one teacher for many learners, as in classrooms) or 1-to-1, (each learner has access to a virtual teacher, as in standard CBT), towards a N-to-1 model. The learner can select among the several available teachers the one who best suits his/her learning style. An extensive use of engineering methodologies (reusable modules compliant with international standards) for the design and development cuts the development time, while the learner-centered personalization cuts the time required to learn, thus improving the effectiveness of current Computer-Based teaching and training packages, and reducing the total effective cost.
THE PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH The 3DE project takes a novel approach by providing tools to analyse the learner as an individual, that is learning style preferences and competence analysis, and identification of prior learning in different environments (e.g. school, work).
1
Dante Del Corso, Politecnico di Torino, Dip. di Elettronica, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy, de
[email protected] Emanuela Ovcin, COREP, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy,
[email protected] Gaetano Morrone, COREP,
[email protected] , 4 Dimitri Gianesini, COREP,
[email protected] 5 Sari Salojarvi, Vaasa Polytechnic, Wolffin tie 30, FIN-65200 VAASA,Finland,
[email protected] 6 Tanja Kvist, Vaasa Polytechnic, Wolffintie 30, FIN-65200 VAASA,Finland,
[email protected] 2 3
Work partially supported by European Community under the Information Society Technology (IST) RTD programme, contract IST -1999-10697. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this paper. It does not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.
0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-21
Session F2C The results of this phase, and the specification of final competences and skills by the learner or by course customers are the input data for the tool (Custom Course Compiler) which creates the personal Custom Courses. The personalization addresses both the contents and the user interface, such as appearance, commands, and languages. The core of the environment is the design methodology, supported by detailed description of procedures, from the establishment of learning goals, through learner analysis, tutoring units for learning to learn, design and development guides and tools. Usual facilities such as virtual classes, cooperative learning, learner self-assessment, and educational effectiveness assessment are supported by the 3DE environment or by the selected delivery platform. The use of standards for interfaces and metadata, such as IEEE P1484 [3] or CENS/ISSS [4] has been enforced to promote reusability and cost reduction. The basic pedagogical principles of the project are: • each individual has a unique scheme and representation of knowledge, that is the new information is always interpreted according to the basic assumptions, cultural framework, previous experience etc. and then transformed into new knowledge as a sum of the old knowledge and the interpretation; • learning is an active, personal process that cannot be effective without including also social interaction between peers and experts. This is realised e.g. by building the courses on learning assignments realised in various ways, letting the learners do the thinking and problem solving as far as possible. They could also be connected to one’s own work; • individuals have different preferences in the ways of acquiring information, the learning environment, in the amount of tutoring, etc; • it is extremely important also to help people to know themselves as learners and help them to find the suitable tools and ways for learning. Embedding proper design rules in the whole environment enforces pedagogical aspects of design [7]. Engineering design methodologies, which guide towards error-free prototypes, are for the first time applied to pedagogical and didactic products. One of the goals is to achieve correctness by construction, that is to avoid at least some of the worst mistakes. Customization: reduce time-to-learn Courses are no longer designed for a ‘class’ of students, but fine-tuned for each learner, according to: • the entrance competence and skill levels, • the results of learning style preference analysis, • the learning goals. All contents in 3DE are presented through consistent user interfaces; attention is focused on contents, not on the environment.
Since each course is tailored for the individual person, the time spent to learn a specific skill or to acquire a competence and the related effort are reduced. Such high customization requires the slicing of ‘knowledge’ in very small pieces (micromodules). With this approach the design and construction phases must be repeated for each learner, and following the usual teacher-driven approach brings to unbearable costs; this issue is addressed by a second key innovation of 3DE, as described in the following paragraph. The learning style model The current paradigm since 80's in the educational science is the paradigm of constructivism. The basic idea of the constructivism is that the learner has an own active contribution to his learning process (in social context). Each individual processes and analyses information in a different way, due to past experience and knowledge: thus acquiring the information from another person (teacher) means acquiring that information with his “personal” interpretation. In this sense we can say that “learning” takes place after the learner has interpreted in his personal way the information given by other people, constructing his own knowledge by combining new information and experiences to his existing knowledge structures. The best known representative of the constructive theory is Kolb. His contribution to the theory has been in verifying the existence of different styles of individual learners [6,7]. We have chosen this model to classify learner styles, because there is a lot of evidence on the existence of these learning styles and types and their relevance to students' learning process [8,9]. A key decision in the 3DE pedagogical design has been the selection of the learning style model and the related learning style test. The group from Polytechnic of Vaasa evaluated various models to select the most useful for 3DE purposes. The final choice was for the Kolb’s and Honey & Mumford’s model [9], since they concentrate on the learning process, which is the most essential level of learning styles. The other models study the learning process concentrating on less relevant aspects, such as the whole personality (Myers & Briggs, [10]) or senses and the environmental factors (Dunn & Dunn [11]). Learning is mainly related with information perceiving and processing, and the selected model measures these characteristics. The Honey & Mumford’s learning style names and the style descriptions are used also in the 3DE learning style profiling due to their more easy vocabulary. The learning style test results are used to match the 3DE courses with each student personal learning styles. The student can choose whether to follow his preferred learning style, or try the others to develop his weaker learning styles. These choices can be made in a Learning Style and Course Level Menu at any time; the actual switching of learning style can occur only at the boundary of medium-grain educational units (the ‘themes’). It is also possible to return to the original learning style or course level.
0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-22
Session F2C Selected learning styles are: Activists are active learners. They like to discuss about the things to be learned and work actively on the subject in a group. Activists like diverse tasks, new experiences and problems from which to learn. • Reflectors also learn from the new experiences, but they don’t want to be actively involved in them. Reflectors like to observate situations, to research the subjects and make analyses and reports. They need time to produce new ideas and theories based on the new experiences. • Theorists like to have the things to be learned offered in their context: models, systems or theories. They analyze things deeply and like to listen to or read about interesting ideas that emphasize rationality and are well argued. • Pragmatists like to study things that have practical advantages and they like opportunities to implement what they just have learned. They value high face validity and real problems and enjoy chances to practice techniques with feedback from experts. The Learning Style Questionnaire is under validation process with different student groups, and so far the results seem to be supportive. As the pilot courses will become available, the whole system can be tested with real learners. •
Learning style parameters To keep all information collected with the learning style test, the learner profile is expressed by a normalized parameters for each of the four basic styles (A,B,C,D), rather than by a sungle prevalent learning style, as in other models. The numbers identify a sequence of preferred styles, with precise positions in the range from very high (100) to very low preference (0). The learner is therefore identified by a tuple (A,B,C,D). The parameters are stored in the 3DE database, and are fed back to the student as a written report with some explanations.
Competence goals
The learning styles of the course and of each micromodule are represented by the same parameters, included in the metadata of the learning units. Since it is very difficult to evaluate precise numbers for each learning unit, conventional values are assigned to the main and the secondary learning style. Enhancing the learning skills The 3DE learning environment includes material to enhance the learning skills. A ‘Learning to learn’ micromodule, where the student can get information about the learning skills and techniques, can be accessed from each course. A course assessment micromodule is inserted at the end of each course, to gather information for the improvement of the course itself and of the didactic approach.
THE 3DE SYSTEM The personalized learning packages are built from a library of micromodules worked out specifically for different learning styles. A complete view of the 3DE project structure is in figure 1. For the designers and developers, the creation of a Custom Course in 3DE starts with the definition of the educational goal, and of options and constraints (e.g. the language, the maximum length of a ‘lesson’, or special interface requirements for impaired people). A library of micromodules must then be developed, including tests to assess le arner’s competence, knowledge, skills, and preferences in the areas linked to the Course Goal. Micromodules will be developed in different languages, and should contain true interactive MultiMedia (audio/video, animations, interactive simulations, virtual laboratories, …). From the micromodule library and the learner data it is possible to start the building of the Custom Course, taking into account all the previous points. The task is carried out by an automated tool, with supervision of a real teacher.
Database organization, metadata, content, learner profile
Learning styles analysis
Custom Course Compiler
Pilots
Delivery, Assessment, Evaluation
FIGURE 1 GLOBAL VIEW OF THE 3DE PROJECT
0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-23
Session F2C For the learner/trainee the steps through a 3DE educational module are: 1. Selection of the final educational goal; 2. Competence and learning preference analysis; 3. Attending the course (with total freedom of time, place, pace), including: • a mix of ‘studying’, solving problems and exercises (depending on the learning style preferences); • use of simulators and virtual laboratories; • interaction and co-operation with real tutors and other learners; • intermediate self-evaluation tests; • final test, with certification of results (if required). The delivery of the course will exploit the Internet, and can be tailored for specific user need. For sites with poor bandwidth, or to reduce connection costs for private users, also other media (CD-ROM, DVD) can be considered. In this case the course must be frozen, and some of the 3DE capabilities are lost. Learner process The first time the learner approaches to the 3DE system, he will be presented a description of 3DE objectives in order to explain the concept of Learning Style and Custom Courses. After the registration the user must compile the 3DE Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ) and at the end he will be presented a short LSQ explanation, the results and a micromodule (adapted to the learning style of the student) about the Learning to Learn Theory. Once the learner is registered, he has two different entry points in the system: • Course Selection: the user can select the learning goals, through a hierarchical selection of contents organized in Domain, Sub Domain, Course, Theme. At each level a list of available choices is presented to the user. As a course is selected a short description is presented, including syllabus, timing, organization, general objectives (competence/abilities achieved after the course), level of the course, detailed goals (list of skills ...), evaluation methods, credits, duration, prerequisites. After user confirmation the Custom Course Compiler can assemble themes matching the Learner Learning Style and the selected target. The Custom Course Compiler assembles a first learner path, and presents the learner a list of detailed prerequisites; the user can select some of them for inclusion in the 3E compiled course. If there are too many missing prerequisites, the learner is invited to follow a preliminary course. • Personal Portfolio: a Personal Portfolio, containing the list of active courses, is built for each user. From the portfolio page the user can continue a course from the last visited point. During the course the user can change the primary learning style. The change can be temporary or permanent, but the user can always go back to the preferred learning style identified for him through the
LSQ. The basic principle is to assist the learner, and guide his choices, without giving too tight constraints. Two assessment micromodules are inserted at the end of the course. The first one is to evaluate the learner technical skills about the complete course, while the second one is a feedback to evaluate the course contents and organization, the learning system itself (tutoring, resources, collaborative tools) and the learner own efforts and performance. Design and author process The creation of a Custom Course in 3DE starts with the definition of an educational goal by the educational organisation: company, university, school, or by the learner her/himself. The next step is the development of a library of micromodules for the target subject, or the selection among already available ones. After the analysis of learner’s competence, knowledge, skills, and preference the compilation of the Custom Course can start. The hand assembly of courses by teachers is here replaced by an automated tool (the CCC: Custom Course Compiler), with supervision and limited interaction of teachers, which creates a Custom Course optimised for each single individual. Moving from assembly (hand-done by instructors) to compile (automatically performed by a SW tool, under supervision of the course designer / pedagogical expert) allows automated handling of navigation and links, and embedded “educational syntax” checks.
THE CUSTOM COURSE COMPILER Object Hierarchy The Custom Course Compiler (CCC) is the ‘heart’ of the 3DE project. It builds custom courses from the micromodule library taking into account the individual learning style, the final learning goals, and verifying the chaining of prerequisites. The content elements in 3DE are organized in a hierarchy of Learning Objects, Micromodules, Themes, Course (with the same granularity of CEN/ISSS LTWS [4]), as shown in figure 2. The learning object is an elementary resource, such as a text, a drawing, and a video clip. Usually there is no benefit in presenting a single learning object to the learner; since its validity comes from insertion in a context. The learning objects are not handled by the 3DE system: no learning style parameter is directly associated to them. It is responsibility of the author/developer to select the proper objects to be assembled in micromodules. The micromodule is an elementary, logically indivisible learning unit, composed by learning objects, links and relations, and a presentation interface. The micromodule is an autonomous unit, which can be used alone to teach an elementary concept (however in most cases also the micromodule is conceived and designed for delivery in a context). For a more precise idea of what a micromodule is, we can say that the learner will spend on a single
0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-24
Session F2C micromodule a time ranging from 5' (reading a screen page, viewing a video) to 15'. This time includes different activities, such as reading, interactive task, following external links, tests and exercises. The micromodule is described by a set of didactical metadata, which include its characterisation in terms of learning style provided by the validator, the prerequisites necessary to understand the micromodule content (input) and the learning goals (output). This information is used by the CCC to select the best micromodules for each course/learner pair.
Prerequisites chain X
Y
Prerequisites for Y Prerequisites for the course
W
Prerequisites for X
Z
Prerequisites for Z
Prerequisites for W
Course delivery chain Course entry
W
Z
Y
Course exit
X
A COMPILED COURSE
COURSE THEME
FIGURE 3
THEME
GRAPH OF THE COURSE AND A COMPILED COURSE
MicroModule THEME
MicroModule
MicroModule learning object learning object
THEME
learning object learning object
In the sequence the control moves softly from the authors to the system, as shown in figure 4. Learning Objects are seen and manipulated only by authors, Micromodules and Themes have intermediate ownership, and the Course is assembled by the CCC, without intervention by the author.
FIGURE 2 OBJECT HIERARCHY IN 3DE COURSE
The theme is an intermediate step from micromodules to courses, and it consists of a co-ordinate sequence of micromodules. The chaining of prerequisites among the micromodules within a theme is guaranteed by the authors; the CCC will not verify chaining of micromodules inside themes. A theme is also characterized by didactical metadata, including the learning style parameters. We assume that micromodules within the same theme are developed by the same author or authoring group: that is, there is some direct communication among people which develop the theme to guarantee chaining and coherence. Inside the theme any sequencing problem is solved by the author(s). To develop a new theme an author can reuse learning objects and even complete micromodules from other themes, but they are assembled as a new independent theme (eventually with the same content, but different learning style). A course is a set of themes linked by their prerequisites and organized into an oriented graph. The chaining of themes takes into account the prerequisite verification: if a theme X requires the learner to have preliminary information which are provided by themes Y and Z, then these themes must be included in the chain before X. Usually there are different themes for the same topics but with different learning styles. Therefore a course corresponds to several paths within the same set of topics. The CCC, visiting the graph, chooses the path where all the themes best match the student learning style (see figure 3).
3DE
THEME MICROMODULE
AUTHORS
LEARNING OBJECT
FIGURE 4 VISIBILITY AND CONTRO L OF 3DE OBJECTS
The loop problem The presence of multiple authorship is mandatory in 3DE, both to develop a significant amount of contents, and to generate micromodules in different learning styles. Several authors can develop different micromodules, and the system must be able to assemble their work to build the complete courses. A key issue is how mu ch each author must know about the others which are working on the same or similar subject. This applies also for update, competition and revision or courses some time after the first development. If each micromodule is described by proper metadata, the CCC can take care of the chaining. We can expect that an author takes care of connections (prerequisites) with nearby micromodules (that is within the same theme), while the CCC is responsible for proper chaining among themes and micromodules (but with already specified prerequisites). If authors can independently develop micromodules, loops can arise. A simple example is in figure 5:
0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-25
Session F2C micromodule A requires prerequisites provided by micromodule B, which in turn requires prerequisites provided by module A. If they have been developed independently by different authors none of them can notice the loop. The loop can occur in the compilation phase, when the CCC selects micromodules from different authors. They can be identified from the graphs representing micromodule links: with a loop the graph is not oriented.
2000 with a work plan for 3 years, has completed the educational design phase, and is now dealing with the development of core tools and of short pilot courses, to test the design methodology. Details and updates on project status are available from the project website [1]. The granularity of the system evolved from micromodules to themes, to cope with the loop problem. Themes are assembled by authors, which take care of prerequisite chaining. The Custom Course Compiler checks micromodule prerequisites inside a theme and builds courses by using themes which satisfy the learner’s learning objectives, competences and learning styles. 3DE cooperates with other European projects on researches about interoperability and reuse of learning material, and is actively involved in the development of learning technologies standards.
REFERENCES
FIGURE 5
[1]
3DE Project, http://www.3deproject.com
[2]
EU Fifth Framework Programme, http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/fp5.html
[3]
IEEE LTSC (Learning Technology Standard Committee) P1484.12, http://ltsc.ieee.org/p1484
[4]
CEN/ISSS LTWS (learning Technology Workshop), http://www.cenorm.be/isss
[5]
Salojärvi S., Kvist T., Del Corso D., Ovcin E., Ossola P., et al.. "Educational Design”, 3DE Project, Deliverable 1, December 2000.
[6]
Kolb D.A., "Experimental Learning. Experience as the Source of Learning and Development", Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey, 1984
[7]
Kolb D.A.;,Rubin,I.,Osland, J.S., "Organizational Behavior. And Experimental Approach", Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey, 1991
[8]
Honey, P.; Mumford, A. ,"Using your learning styles", Maidenhead, Berkshire, 1986
[9]
Honey, P.; Mumford, A.,"The manual of learning styles", Maidenhead, Berkshire, 1992
EXAMPLE OF LOOP
Since the prerequisites strictly depend by the content of the micromodule itself, the author has to provide them, specifying the correct sequence of micromodules in a theme. When an author decides to insert ‘alternative’ micromodules in a theme, he has to specify their position in the theme, in terms of prerequisites and of equivalence to other already present micromodules. This actually generates a new theme. When the Custom Course Compiler builds up the course, the selection of the proper material is made on the best matching of the theme’s learning style.
CONCLUSIONS
[10] Leino & Leino, "Learning Modalities, Styles and Strategies", O'Connor 2000, 1996 [11] Carbo, M., Dunn, R. & Dunn, K., "Teaching Students to Read Through Their Individual Learning Styles", Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall,1986
The 3DE project develops a methodology and tools to build courses customized for the requirements and needs of individual learners. A different version of each course is built from a library of micromodules, specifically prepared for different learning styles. The aim is to improve the effectiveness of computer-based teaching packages by reducing both the development costs and the user effort to learn. This paper described the general structure of the project and the results of the first phase, devoted to definition of the pedagogical design framework. The project, started in March 0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2C-26
