Sébastien George

Contextualizing discussions in distance learning systems

In distance learning systems, communication tools are rarely integrated into learning activities, which does not encourage their use. The main goal of our work is to mitigate this lack of integration. Our aim is to bring the discussion activities closer to the learning activities, i.e. to situations to which the discussions must ideally relate to in order to promote learning between students. Thus, we suggest two models of forum which are contextual and based on a structuring of discussions respectively according to (1) content structure and (2) cognitive structure.

E-learning standards as a basis for contextual forums design

This article argues that linking communication to learning activities offers an interesting approach to develop the efficiency of learning management systems in facilitating and increasing discussions between students. We propose, present and elaborate a forum model that is based on two special features: a contextual view and forum structures. The contextual view of the forum, which is always visible, allows the user to focus on pertinent discussions. Two kinds of forum structures are offered: a content structure and a cognitive structure. In this paper, we discuss the use of some e-learning standards as a basis for the design of the contextual forum tool. The description of the conceptual framework for online communications and the computing implementation aims at giving researchers some possible uses and recommendations in dealing with context-sensitive communication tools.

Introducing mobility in serious games: enhancing situated and collaborative learning

This paper explores the introduction of mobile technologies in a particular serious games subset called learning games. We focus on two main purposes where mobility turns out to be useful: situated learning and collaborative learning. The article outlines the opportunities and the remaining challenges for these learning situations. Some important issues are highlighted for immerging learners in real context. We also propose some scenarios to illustrate the benefits of mobile devices in classroom situations

A Player Model for Adaptive Gamification in Learning Environments

Many learning environments are swiftly abandoned by the learners, even if they are effective. Gamification is as a recent game-based learning approach that can enhance the learners’ motivation. However, individual expectations and preferences towards game-like features may be very different from one person to another. This paper presents a model to adapt gamification features according to a player profile of the learners. Two version of this model are evaluated within a gamified online learning environment. The first version comes from experts’ judgment, and the second one is induced from empirical data. Our experiments confirm that the first version can be efficient to predict the player’s preferences among the gamification features.

A Knowledge Management Tool for the Interconnection of Communities of Practice

In their daily practice, practitioners belong to local communities of practice CoPs within their organisation. This knowledge is rarely capitalised upon because discussions are mainly verbal. Practitioners can also belong to general CoPs online. Within these general CoPs, discussions are rarely linked to the context in which they appeared, since the members are from different companies or institutions. This paper 1 connects these two levels of CoPs by contacting practitioners belonging to CoPs centred on the same general activity but who are geographically distributed and 2 capitalises on the produced knowledge by contextualising, allowing it to be accessible and reusable by all the members. The authors detail the main results of the research: 1 a model of the interconnection of CoPs ICP to support knowledge sharing and dissemination; and 2 a specific knowledge management tool for the ICP knowledge base. The authors apply the model and platform to university tutors by: 1 developing a use case, which links the model and the TE-Cap 2 platform and highlights the new possibilities offered by the knowledge management tool; and 2 conducting a descriptive investigation lasting for five months.

Supporting learners' activities in a distance learning environment

In this paper, we describe the social context of a distance learning situation between teachers and learners and its cooperative learning activities. The objective is to make learners cooperate through project pedagogy. The project pedagogy is based on experiential learning and consists of learners working together in a team. During their cooperative activities, learners are supported by the system in a way that depends on the difficulties detected and the support style. When the system is no longer able to provide useful advice, learners are supported remotely by the teacher. We describe a model of multi-agent architecture providing this support. This architecture is made up of various communicating agents distributed across a network like the internet. We have developed a distance learning environment, based on this multi-agent architecture, in the field of educational robotics. We give an example to show how teachers can support learners remotely by modifying their interface or by acting on the distant physical device (a micro-robot).

The development of TE-Cap: an assistance environment for online tutors

Our research is based on the hypothesis that the most important problem that has to be solved, so as to help tutors, is the gap between required competencies of distance tutoring and the lack of training and recommendations given to them on the role they have to play in the learning process. In this article, we detail the development of the assistance environment for tutors named TE-Cap (Tutoring Experience Capitalization). We first present results of interviews conducted with tutors to define their explicit and implicit needs. We then detail functionalities of the TE-Cap (Tutoring Experience Capitalization) platform we developed and first results of an experiment, in terms of computing functionalities and interface design. Finally, we present some future directions of our research.

Motivation and Engagement in MOOCs: How to Increase Learning Motivation by Adapting Pedagogical Scenarios?

With the MOOC movement, education stakeholders are taking part of a pedagogical renewal. These dynamics present different advantages such as: massiveness, openness, accessibility, etc. However, it raises particular issues related to the dropout. To remedy to this issue, a promising lead resides in supporting learners’ motivation and engagement. To reach this goal, innovative pedagogic strategies and /or sophisticated Instructional design, personalization or even adaptability are needed. The purpose of this paper is to examine the point of view of literature, the dropout issue and possible solutions to motivate learners.

DDART, a Dynamic Dashboard for Collection, Analysis and Visualization of Activity and Reporting Traces

Most Learning Management Systems (LMS) focus on providing rich learning materials to the learners but rarely offer possibilities to monitor and analyze their learning processes. However metacognitive strategies argue that learners can improve their learning performances by monitoring their activities, especially in the context of Project-Based Learning (PBL). Our work consists in designing tools to support metacognitive strategies. In this paper, a framework and a dynamic dashboard for PBL situations are proposed to help learners to collect, analyze and visualize the meaningful traces of their activities by them-selves. The proposed framework integrates activity traces (interactions with the LMS) and reporting traces (semi-structured sentences written by the learners). The dynamic dashboard supports learners in the creation customizable indicators through a user-friendly interface.

A Web-Based System for Observing and Analyzing Computer Mediated Communications

Tracking data of users activities resulting from computer mediated communication (CMC) tools (forum, chat, etc.) is often carried out in an ad-hoc manner, which either confines the reusability of data in different purposes or makes data exploitation difficult. Our research works are biased toward methodological challenges involved in designing and developing a generic system for tracking users activities while interacting with asynchronous communication tools like discussion forums. We present in this paper, an approach for building a Web-based system for observing and analyzing user activity on any type of discussion forums