Adaptive Navigation Support and Open Social Learner Modeling for PAL

Directions of work

The project focuses on both exploration and implementation of adaptive navigation support and open social learner modeling and pursues three directions of work

• Exploring open social learner modeling interface for diverse learning content
• Enhancing algorithms for personalized guidance using knowledge-based and social approaches
• Developing architectural solutions and authoring tools to support open social learner modelingPAWS participation in ADL is focused in the development of MasteryGrids system. Mastery Grids is a visual-rich, interactive, adaptive E-learning platform with integrated functionalities enabling multi-facet social comparison, open user modeling, and multi-type learning materials support. It presents and compares user learning progress and knowledge level (mastery) by colored grids, tracks user activities and feedbacks dynamically and provides flexible user-centered navigation across different content levels (e.g. topic, question) and different content types (e.g. question, example) of learning materials.

The architecture supporting Mastery Grids fulfills a major objective, portability, which is the ability to be integrated to other systems with little set up and modification. The architecture is modular and includes different software components:

• frontend user-system interaction interface, the Mastery Grids Interface,

• backend Aggregate services communicating between the main interface and user modeling services,

• backend user modeling services, and

• backend content providing applications.

An overall architecture of the system can be sen in the next figure.

Systems

Mastery Grids

MasteryGrids is an open social student modeling interface written in Javascript. The interface shows the student's progress levels in a series of topics and content items as long as provides navigation support and access to educational content.

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Aggregate

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Authoring Tools

Content Authoring

This tool provides the interface for teachers to create and index annotated examples. more

Course Authoring

This tool provides the interface for teachers to create courses for Mastery Grids. more

Group Authoring

This tool provides the interface for teachers to define groups of students who can access the course. more

Resources

Software sources and documentation is in GitHub. The Mastery Grids Interface, backend Aggregate and documentation can be found here. User model services can be found in here.

A demo view of MasteryGrids can be accessed here

Publications

• Loboda, T., Guerra, J., Hosseini, R., and Brusilovsky, P. (2014) Mastery Grids: An Open Source Social Educational Progress Visualization. In: S. de Freitas, C. Rensing, P. J. Muñoz Merino and T. Ley (eds.) Proceedings of 9th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2014), Graz, Austria, September 16-19, 2014 (Best paper award).