La Competencia Lectora

Most lecturers have already created learning content that they use to teach their students. If they have reused their content for later modules, most of them have tweaked it for each usage, incorporating their experiences of the material: Optimising the parts the students did not understand, adapting parts to new developments and findings, etc.

It is a difficult task, even for experts, to create non-linear and adaptive content and it usually takes a team of specialists to create it. However, the aim of this research is to find a concept that supports lecturers without a background in adaptive or interactive structures. Thus, the commonly accepted concepts and process have been rethought.

The result is the opposite of currently widely used content creation processes for adaptive and interactive content: Instead of first planning and implementing the structure before any content is created, existing linear content is used and delinearised step by step. Therefore, different authors’ content is added and correlated. It is decomposed by its content structure, and composed by altering the original path as little as possible. Adaptation is done lazily, only when needed or requested. This approach has the following benefits:

• Existing content can be reused as is.

• Each lecturer (author) can teach and therefore create content and its structure as he prefers.

• Different content structures and therefore ways of teaching are supported. • While creating the content there is no need to think in terms of adaptive or

interactive structures. Lecturers can think of their content in their preferred way – linearly.

• When relating different authors’ content during the authoring process, only the corresponding content pieces need to be found. There is no need to realise, accept, or merge the other structures, like didactic, domain, etc.

Now that a rough concept has been defined, the aspects needed for an implemen- tation are examined in the following sections. A real prototypical implementation is discussed in chapter 5 Prototypical Implementation of the Adaptive eLearning

3.3. Implemented Concept

3.3

Implemented Concept

A rough concept has been developed in the previous sections. The following sections describe the requirements of an adaptive system, which is based on the approaches discussed above. Although these requirements describe the functionality, which an adaptive player software should provide, the underlying aim of the research is a concept applicable for non-technical users. The authoring process itself is outlined in the following chapter.

3.3.1

System Requirements

The main requirement of the system is to present adaptive content in a coherent way, independently of any special content [106]. To facilitate the authoring process it has to support different structures. Further details can be found in the following sections.

Coherence, Conclusiveness, and Completeness

Important requirements for the application are content coherence, conclusiveness, and completeness. Of course, the system cannot ensure these requirements on its own; it needs help for this. This help is either authored explicitly, or hidden in the linear content structures.

The system must be able to provide coherence and conclusiveness, so that module- content is not lined up pointlessly or contradictorily. For example a student should not be led to start a practical for object-oriented programming before he can learn the corresponding content.

Additionally, the system should do its best to ensure completeness, to lead to a successful end. For example, students should feel assured that they were presented with all relevant information, from the lecturers point of view, needed to pass examinations.

Independence of Content

The concept and the system should not assume any pedagogical strategies, content, or structures, because these aspects should be part of the content as specified by the authors. They should not be limited by the system. This signifies that it is not only independent from the media type, but the system should be usable for each kind of learning content and learning styles. For example, it should not make a difference whether the content is a video or a set of slides, until the author explicitly defines that they should be treated differently.

Due to technical restrictions, this requirement will very likely not be completely fulfilled in the early stage of development. For example, user interactions will be restricted to the implemented ones instead of giving the full range of possibilities. User Adaptation

Two types of adaption to the user are possible: Micro and macro adaptation. Because this concept is based on pre authored linear content that is not changed during presentation, but influences the flow of presenting the content, it realises macro adaptation. In the eLearning context this is also called sequencing.

Adaptation needs to be influenced implicitly and explicitly. For example, the user’s performance, his already chosen content, and his learner preferences [23], should influence path creation. Furthermore, content sequences could be repeated with different learning styles due to failed assessments. But it should also be possible for the user to have the final say about the next step.

Due to the usage of macro adaptation, the user’s interactions only can have an influence at discrete instants of time between two steps. Of course, interactions may be done at any time, but the paths are only built in between two steps, so any manipulation that may affect this process can be only interpreted during creation.

The presented content may be interactive on its own. Thus, it may react to user interactions directly. However, this is the content’s responsibility. Any interactions

3.3. Implemented Concept that should be passed to the pathfinder need to be collected by changing the context variables accordingly.

There is one exception: The user action to go to the next step is possible at any time. The system will always react to this interaction by stopping the current step and starting the pathfinder.

Support of Different Structures

The same topic can be explained in different ways. Because the adaptation of this concept is based on changing to the right position of another author’s content, different structures have to be supported. The concept achieves this demand by using the linear representations of structures.