However to do e-learning experiments we need students and apparently there are plenty of students in Romania, which is why I’ve spent the last two weeks teaching a Web Application Development course in at Bucharest University.

I’m also here to (hopefully) confirm some hypotheses made by Craig Stewart in his PhD thesis on cultural based adaptation. The main thrust of Craig’s idea is that different cultural backgrounds can influence user preferences in relation to user interfaces. To confirm this we are splitting the students into two groups to undertake an online revision course on PHP and then giving group 1 the ‘Romanian’ interface and group 2 an opposite interface, in this case the ‘UK’ interface. We switch the interfaces round for the second course on Perl and as the students are taking pre/post tests we hope to see more improvement in students who use the ‘Romanian’ layout.

None of the cultural adaptation theory is my research. However the benefit to me is a perfect opportunity to test the layout adaptation research I’ve been working on and then writing up over christmas and January. Also we’ve been testing my system on it’s own using a MySQL revision course to see if student’s learn faster using my the adaptive learning environment that I’ve developed, called ADE.

As I’ve spent much blood, sweat and all the small hours in creating my lessons and example web application (QuizMaster!) to go with them, I thought I’d make them available to the world in general, so here they are:

Java MVC

Session Handling

Data Web Access

Persistent Storage

Web Development Examples

Bear in mind that if you think Java is a nice cup of coffee these slides and examples will definitely not be for you!

I’m presenting a talk on “Reusing Adaptation Strategies in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems” later this morning and the slides are available from here.

Slides

Source

Here’s the abstract in full:

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia offers a more intelligent and customised approach to the field of e-learning then the traditional linear methods. In an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course a student’s learning experiences can be personalised using a user model which could include such information as the student’s knowledge level or learning style.
Adaptive strategies are sets of adaptive rules and once the learning material to be used in a course has been created, adaptive strategies can be applied to allow the personalisation of the course to students. This talk will describe the initial development of a software platform which imports learning content and adaptive strategies and then can display the resulting Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course to students. The software platform, called an adaptation engine, will be able to implement different types of adaptive strategies and test their suitability.

It went well and there were plenty of questions about the project afterwards. The presentation was created in OpenOffice and you can download the file here [3069kb].