We are excited to announce that The AeLP in collaboration with LAMS will be giving a full-day tutorial at the next Artificial Intelligence in Education conference in Brighton, UK, July 6/7 2009 (AIED 2009).

LAMS is a web based system for in-class activity management that enabled educators to sequence educational activities, and then deploy them to students. The AeLP is web-based environment for authoring, deployment and monitoring of Adaptive Tutorials.

Recent joint effort by the LAMS and AeLP teams has enabled a powerful web 2.0 mash-up – teachers can easily embed Adaptive Tutorials into LAMS’ in-class activity sequences.

Tutorial Details:

Name: From planning to classroom in less than 2 hours: Developing Adaptive Tutorials using LAMS and AeLP.

This tutorial focuses on the challenges of supporting teachers throughout the entire pedagogical process of intelligent learning environment. A new but fairly mature software solution will be presented: a web 2.0 mash-up of two existing software systems: the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) - a tool for orchestrating learning activities, based on Learning Design principles, and the Adaptive eLearning Platform – an authoring, deployment and analysis system for Adaptive Tutorials, which by themselves are mini-ITS’s.

The combine approach creates a powerful education experimentation environment where pedagogical hypothesis can be evaluated, adapted and then shared and published, contributing to the notion of teachers as ‘action researchers’ confirming or disproving their hypotheses about the best way to use education technology.

This tutorial is recommended for teacher, educational researchers, and computer scientists who are interested in Learning Design, ITS Technology and User modeling.

Date: 6 or 7 July, 2009

Instructors: Dror Ben-Naim, Ernie Ghiglione

Duration: full day.

Background

It is recognized that an obstacle to driving Intelligent Learning Environments (ILE’s) into mainstream adoption by the teaching community, is the lack of teachers support through the entire ILE process: Design, Development, Deployment, Reflection and Adaptation. Although research has been done on supporting teachers through design to deployment of ILEs, mainly through the advent of authoring environments, there is surprisingly little discussion about support for teachers’ Reflection - the ability to draw conclusions from ILEs usage, and Adaptation - adapting the content to better meet the needs of students.

Another problem in existing e-learning systems and authoring tools have several limitations in respect of support provided and usability, and cannot accommodate the needs of teachers who increasingly look for more intelligent services and support when designing instruction.

• Introduction and background: Learning Design and Adaptive eLearning: state of the art and pending challenges. Overview of LAMS – capturing pedagogical design into reusable digital form, and overview of the AeLP – how interactive and adaptive tutorials can be built in the Virtual Apparatus Framework
• Mash-up: from embedding Adaptive Tutorials in LAMS sequences, to live inter-system monitoring and analysis of students interaction
• The teacher as an ‘action researcher: measuring the effect of intrinsic adaptive feedback on learners’ performance, then adapt it to better meet the needs of learners
• Adaptive sequencing of activities based on student’s performance (LAMS branching, AeLP’s adaptive sequencing)
• Identification of patterns of effective learning design by means of user-driven and data-driven analysis

About The Instructors

Dror Ben-Naim is currently doing his PhD in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University Of New South Wales. He developed the Adaptive eLearning Platfrom during his research work on teacher support in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. After pilot studies that suggested imporved learning by students, the AeLP has been successfully expanded into a cross-UNSW project involving 10 Schools in 4 Faculties. He has six years experience in developing educational software and eLearning content and has mentored students through their Honours and bachelors degrees.

Ernie Ghiglione is the LAMS Project Manager, based at the Macquarie E-Learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE), Macquarie University. He has previous experience in various open source projects in e-learning. He has developed parts of the .LRN Learning Management System, specially the Learning Object Repository, content delivery platform, one of its assessment engines, the IMS Content Packaging, IMS Metadata and SCORM implementation. Prior to managing e-learning projects, Ernie led large enterprise software development in the US, the Netherlands and India for five years. He holds an MSc BSc Management Information Systems (magna cum laude) from New York University and a Master of Software Engineering from the University of Sydney.

Learn More

What is LAMS:

LAMS is a revolutionary new tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides teachers with a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities can include a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration. LAMS can be used as a stand alone system or in combination with other learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Sakai, .LRN, WebCT and BlackBoard.

LAMS provides teachers with a visual authoring environment for creating, storing and re-using sequences of learning activities. Teachers drag and drop activities into the authoring interface and then join the activities together to produce a learning sequence. This workflow model is what principally distinguishes LAMS from other more content based LMS by providing teachers and learners with sequences of activities with a high level of interactivity and collaboration. LAMS has a wide range of tools designed to be used for a range of pedagogical approaches, by teachers and students with varying levels of technical expertise.

What is the Adaptive eLearning Platform

The Adaptive eLearning Platform (AeLP) is a complete, web based solution for authoring Adaptive Tutorials, deploying them to students, monitoring student progress, and analyzing student behaviour.

An Adaptive Tutorial is an interactive, online learning activity that intelligently adapts to student knowledge level based on a live analysis of interaction data and performance. Adaptive Tutorials are authored in the AeLP's Authoring Environment and are deployed to students by either embedding them into any LMS, or contextualizing them in LAMS Activities. Adaptive Tutorials foster 3 levels of adaptation:

• Adaptive Feedback - when a student working on an Adaptive Tutorial makes a mistake, the Adaptive eLearning Platforms offers intelligent feedback, specific to the error made, and guides them towards a correct answer.
• Adaptive Sequencing - if the students is still struggling with understanding a concept, the aelp offers just in time instructional scaffolding, adapting the activity sequence to the learner’s needs.
• Reflection and Adaptation - teachers are provided with analysis tools that enable reflection and adaptation of their content. By analyzing students behavior, teachers can refine and adapt their content, to better meet the needs of their students