Kateřina Kostolányová

Adaptation of Personalized Education in E-learning Environment

We know from the classic instruction that some students might be hindered and bored by collective teaching. Others, on the other hand, might find it too fast, as a result of which they are not able to understand everything. Other students are satisfied with the pace of instruction but may not be satisfied with the teaching style of a particular teacher. Consequently, such students dislike some teachers and courses and their study results become worse. Those reasons lead to the idea of the optimization of the learning process through the individualization of instruction. [1, 2] The individualization of instruction mirrors each student’s learning style, skills and the already acquired knowledge. Such a method cannot be applied in typical face-to-face classes where the students cannot be treated individually. In the time of the informatization of society, the Internet, and suitable SW and HW instruments, the computer-based (specifically e-learning and web technologies) instruction can easily be realized. [3] The paper describes the proposition and solution of adaptive instruction through e- learning aimed at the personalization of instruction according to each student’s learning style and current knowledge.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

The importance of intelligent tutoring systems has rapidly increased in past decades. There has been an exponential growth in the number of end users that can be addressed as well as in technological development of the environments, which makes it more sophisticated and easily implementable. In the introduction, the paper offers a brief overview of intelligent tutoring systems. It then focuses on two types which have been designed for education of students in the tertiary sector. The systems use elements of adaptivity in order to accommodate to as many users as possible. They serve both as a support of presence lessons and, primarily, as the main educational environment for students in the distance form of studies – e-learning. The systems are described from the point of view of their functionalities and typical features which differentiate them. The authors conclude with an attempt to choose the best features of each system, which would lead to the creation of an even more sophisticated intelligent tutoring system for e-learning.

Adaptive E-Learning: From Theory to Practice

Abstract The theory of adaptive e-learning - the principles of which were published in a monograph (Kostolányová, 2012) - is being developed at the Pedagogical Faculty of the University of Ostrava. However, the verification of the theory in pedagogical practice required much further work, both research and routine. This paper presents the results of several years’ work of researchers, particularly the development of the adaptive LMS, the proposition and implementation of an expert system for the management of the Virtual Teacher, realized pedagogical experiments concerning the system and further development of the theory.

Adaptive Form of Elearning

Abstract Among classic and electronic forms of education, a new type is being considered - the individualised form of education. The main reasoning behind individualised education is to respect differences of individual students. This individualised form of education in connection with the ever-present ICT devices leads to a new form of education - adaptive eLearning: a form of educational process that is in harmony with individual needs of students. This article deals with the basic principles of creating adaptive learning environment; with the current conditions of this issue in the Czech Republic and abroad; and with the outline of possible solutions to the adaptive electronic teaching process. In the second half of the article, the structure of adaptive study aids is described in detail.

Analysis of Learning Styles for Adaptive E-Learning

In adaptive e-learning we try to make learning more efficient by adapting the process of learning to students’ individual needs. To make this adaptation possible, we need to know key students characteristics – his motivation, group learning preferences, sensual type and various learning styles. One of the easiest ways to measure these characteristics is to use questionnaires. New questionnaire was created because there was no questionnaire to measure all these characteristics at once. This questionnaire was filled by 500 students from different fields of study. These results were analyzed using clustering, decision tree and principal component analysis. Several interesting dependencies between students’ properties were discovered using this analysis.

Creation of adaptive study material

The paper is aimed at describing the structure of an adaptive study material. An adaptive study material should respect each student’s individuality and their approach to learning and acquiring new information. That is why the paper contains the characteristics of selected learning styles, which were the most important factors in designing the structure of the adaptive study material. Moreover, this paper also describes the adaptive study material creation process, structure possibilities and contains examples from an actual adaptive study material.

Enhancing an adaptive e-learning system with didactic test assessment using an expert system

The paper deals with a follow-up research on intelligent tutoring systems that were studied in authors’ previous papers from the point of view of describing their advantages. In this paper, the authors make use of the fuzzy logic expert system, which assesses student’s knowledge, and integrate it into the intelligent tutoring system called Barborka. The goal is to create an even more personal student’s study plan, which is tailored both to student’s sensory/learning preferences and the level of knowledge of the given subject.

Intelligent virtual teacher

This paper describes the Virtual Teacher that uses a set of rules to automatically adapt the way of teaching. These rules compose of two parts: conditions on various students’ properties or learning situation; conclusions that specify different adaptation parameters. The rules can be used for general adaptation of each subject or they can be specific to some subject. The rule based system of Virtual Teacher is dedicated to be used in pedagogical experiments in adaptive e-learning and is therefore designed for users without education in computer science. The Virtual Teacher was used in dissertation theses of two students, who executed two pedagogical experiments. This paper also describes the phase of simulating and modeling of the theoretically prepared adaptive process in the modeling tool, which has all the required parameters and has been created especially for the occasion. The experiments are being conducted on groups of virtual students and by using a virtual study material.

PERSONALIZACE VÝUKY V ELEKTRONICKÉM PROSTŘEDÍ

Information and communication technologies are integral part of today’s modern instruction. However, we must point out that the potential of computer and internet based support is not yet being fully exercised. Each student is an individual in the process of education, and therefore should be accordingly provided with “tailored” curriculum. E-learning and educational materials need to be adjusted and designed in such a way to ensure that students would be able to work optimally and master the curriculum given with the highest efficiency. In this paper we briefly describe the whole project dealing with the problematic of “the efficient way of learning” and the most suitable individual teaching methods and teaching styles in electronic education.