The thinking LMS — from InsideHigherEd.com by — Steve Kolowich

If Facebook can use analytics to revolutionize advertising in the Web era, McQuaig suggested, colleges can use the same principles to revolutionize online learning.

The trick, she said, is individualization. Facebook lets users customize their experiences with the site by creating profiles and curating the flow of information coming through their “news feeds.” In the same motion, the users volunteer loads of information about themselves.

Unlike analog forms of student profiling — such as surveys, which are only as effective as the students’ ability to diagnose their own learning needs — Phoenix’s Learning Genome Project will be designed to infer details about students from how they behave in the online classroom, McQuaig said. If students grasp content more quickly when they learn it from a video than when they have to read a text, the system will feed them more videos. If a student is bad at interpreting graphs, the system will recognize that and present information accordingly — or connect the student with another Phoenix student who is better at graph-reading. The idea is to take the model of personal attention now only possible in the smallest classrooms and with the most responsive professors, make it even more perceptive and precise, and scale it to the largest student body in higher education.

“[Each student] comes to us with a set of learning modality preferences,” McQuaig said. The online learning platform Phoenix wants to build, she said, “reject[s] the one-size-fits-all model of presenting content online.” In the age of online education and the personal Web, the standardized curriculum is marked for extinction, McQuaig said; data analytics are going to kill it.

Like Netflix, new college software seeks to personalize recommendations — from InsideHigherEd.com by Marc Parry

Anaheim, Calif. —Amazon. Netflix. Google. All personalize recommendations based on what they know about users.

A new project, unveiled at the Educause conference here today, plans to provide college students a similar experience on academic Web sites.

It’s called Sherpa, like the guides who lead climbers up Mount Everest. The goal of the software, developed by the South Orange County Community College District, is to mine data about students to guide them to courses, information, and services.

That’s a change from what students experience starting and finishing classes on the Blackboard course-management system, said Robert S. Bramucci, South Orange’s vice chancellor for technology and learning services.

From DSC:
I was reading a white paper from Tegrity today (see below graphics). It mentioned that the next frontier for lecture capture technologies is focused on developing more personalized learning experiences.

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—  A brief aside from DSC:
Reminds me of some of the functionality found in Livescribe’s echo smartpen.

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The ability to integrate lecture capture platforms with Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) can help to automate the authentication and authorization needed to ensure learners get to review what they are allowed to review. Integration hooks provided by lecture capture and LMS vendors are viable as methods of ensuring a baseline approach to secure access. Yet most lecture capture systems do not know who the viewer is (as the LMS does the authentication and authorization); they only know that the stream is permitted to play and that students of the course are watching.

This sets the stage for the next transformation of lecture capture solutions – into platforms that can understand not just who their users are, but also what those users need to do and how their experience can be personalized and enhanced.

The coming shift will bring creation of custom learning environments that cater to the individual student by offering personal context-sensitivity, the ability to draw on the knowledge of peers and instructors, and the ability to better manage and monitor each individual learner’s behaviors and customize their experience to their individual needs. Among the major effects of this shift:

  • Democratization of the content creation process as learners themselves contribute to or otherwise use lecture capture tools to learn from or teach others
  • Faster learning by enabling learners to access information more quickly through bookmarks – and placing efficiencies within the platform to streamline teaching and learning
  • Changing impact on educators, who can rely on lecture capture feedback loops based on features like bookmarking to enable them to adjust content and teaching styles to suit learner needs
  • Use of presence and the fact that a system can know a learner to automate and make more efficient the act of finding peers or instructors for further learning interactions
  • Greater ability to deliver content and offer customized features via mobile devices

This white paper focuses on the evolution of lecture capture as a tool for creating a coherent environment for learner-centered instruction, showing the possibilities for improved efficiencies and better learning outcomes.

From DSC:
The integration of a lecture capture system w/ an LMS got me to thinking…what if each person in the world had a constantly-updated, adaptive, web-based learner profile that detailed their current age, current and past places of residence, language(s), hobbies, interests, courses taken, major(s), minor(s), last grade completed, which RSS feeds they subscribe to, which sources of educational content they prefer, etc. Given permission by the student, a vendor’s tool could then query the database and look for particular fields…plugging that  content into their own application for greater context and engagement.

So if a 3rd grader in India loved horses, the math problems could utilize that information to make the problems more engaging to that person.

Hmmm…along these lines, I think I’ll set up some Google alerts to include:

  • Multi-agent systems
  • Adaptive learning systems
  • Artificial intelligence education
  • Distributed e-learning systems
  • Semantic web education
  • Learning agents
  • Intelligent tutoring
  • Online tutoring

The next few years should be veeeerrrryyy interesting. Fasten your seatbelts!

© 2024 | Daniel Christian