Enhancing Learning Management Systems (LMS) with the use of Web Technologies


Δημοσιευμένα: Ιουν 9, 2016
Marigianna Skouradaki
Michail Kalogiannakis
Dimitrios Plexousakis
Περίληψη

By using Learning Management Systems (LMS), educators are able to create numerous resources expressed by various technological tools (HTML pages, quizzes, forums, wikis etc.). In this manner, the student is supported throughout the educational process. The students in their turn interact with these resources, by experiencing an enriched learning process. However, the LMSs do not provide adaptivity or guidance to the students’ choices. As a result the students use their own criteria to choose between large collections of resources. This usually leads to frustration, and wrong choices, as the students’ abilities are not taken into serious consideration.
This paper focuses on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education. More specifically, it proposes a way to enhance the Moodle LMS’s functionality by providing more adaptivity. Our ultimate goal is to improve the situation described above. For this purpose, we have designed a user-friendly interface through which the educator can dynamically develop a knowledge base (in the form of an Ontology) of the learning objectives of the e-course’s resources.
Although the Moodle LMS already supports a mechanism for tagging its resources, this particular proposal extends this functionality, by adding “hierarchical” information. That means that by using the interface the educator adds to the system the knowledge that the learning objectives of «Resource 1», are prerequisite knowledge for understanding the learning objectives of «Resource 2». By offering that knowledge to the system, an agent observes the student’s actions and makes personalized suggestions, concerning navigation, or further actions. Finally, the proposed approach can be extended to different LMSs as Web Services were used for the creation of the above functionalities. By implementing the above features, we achieve the enhancement and extension of Moodle LMS’s adaptive functionality.

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