Subject: Re: Learning Objects, Adaptable? New Instructional Design Methodology
From: Peter Brusilovsky (plb@cs.cmu.edu)
Date: Tue 15 Feb 2000 - 23:25:44 MET
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 17:25:44 -0500 From: Peter Brusilovsky <plb@cs.cmu.edu> Subject: Re: Learning Objects, Adaptable? New Instructional Design Methodology
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Individual traits are becoming a more and more important issue in the
research on adaptive learning systems as systems start providing
different kinds of material for learning the same content and
researchers start realizing that the different students need
different material not only because their knowledge level is
different.
The problem is that that there is a serious luck of understanding of
what kinds of learning material/settings is beneficial for different
classes of students. We do not know even what these different classes
are. I have been attending a number of presentations are different
conferences where the speaker reported experiments with treating
different students differently. Usually, some standard measurable
trait (such as field depencence or visual/verbal orientation) is used
in an experiment to divide students into groups and the experiment
checks which of several settings is most beneficial to each group.
Very few of these studies reported any significant difference. It
means either we still do not know what characteristics of students
are important for adapting the content and settings in Web-based
education, or we have not found proper settings for users with
particular traits.
So, before trying to get active adaptation to something else than
user knowledge to the everyday practice, we will need a lot more
research. So far the only thing we could provide is adaptability.
Provide a variety of educational material and let the user choose.
Peter
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