Framework Adaptive Instruction

Design and Development of a Framework for Adaptive Instruction

This project is funded by the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of IT

Problem Definition

Web based environment suffers from the short attention span of students, low motivation and the relative isolation. To reduce the impact of these barriers in learning through e-Learning, it is important for the content to be structured and organised to draw and retain the student's attention. Personalisation and dynamic adaptation can play a very significant role in this, by tailoring the environment and the style of learning to learners’ preference.

Thus, personalised learning will play a critical role in the success of e-learning. It also enables participants to work in an interactive and collaborative learning environment involving other learners and instructors. It also offers the possibility to customise the learning experience.

The learning environment could automatically adapt the instruction for the learner depending upon its knowledge about the learner’s skills and knowledge level. It may constantly keep track of the progress of the learner, skills acquired, weaknesses and strengths to build a learner model and thus deliver tailored instruction based on the model. This is known as personalisation.

Web based education too has great potential for personalisation which can greatly benefit the learners and educators alike, and more importantly provide the boost that e-learning needs in order to have the kind of impact that it is capable of having on education.

All these aspects combined together provide the ability for e-learning methodologies to compare well with traditional instructor led learning models, and perhaps outrun them. Though this is easy to visualise, technological solutions for this problem are yet to emerge for use in practice. We intend to focus on personalisation and adaptive e-learning in this project, with the intention to develop and deploy indigenous solutions in this area.

The proposed system will address a number of concerns including:

1. Users without significant programming experience should be able to create adaptive instructions.
2. The instructor should be able to split the subject domain into constituent concepts, specify prerequisites for concepts and define relationships among related concepts.
3. Allow creation of adaptive instruction through a suitably designed Adaptive Instruction Markup Language, which reduces course creation time and makes the courses interoperable.
4. Platform for sharing e-learning experience in the country – in the form of hosting Adaptive Instruction Server.
5. Use of Indian languages as medium of instruction for courses in various subjects.

Deliverables of the project

Some of the broad deliverables of this project include:

• Comprehensive study-report on existing work in enabling content for personalised adaptive learning, analysing benefits and problems of different approaches and comparing them.
• Creation of an environment that presents learning material depending on the learner model and preferences
  
  • Design of Framework for Adaptive Instruction
  • Prototype implementation of FAI in the open source domain
• Creation of an environment that will help to create adaptive instruction using FAI
• Creation of content for two sixth standard subjects and two IT courses using environment of this framework
• A repository of open content in e-learning in various disciplines as prescribed by teacher community
• An adaptive Instruction framework server
• Design of instruction markup language.
• All documentation as per process manual related to project proposal

Staff Associated:

1. Sasikumar M.
2. Akshay K.
3. Madhavi P.
4. Suman N.
5. Ankit K.
6. Balaji S.