Meaningful Pedagogy Via Covering the Entire Life Cycle of Adaptive eLearning in Terms of a Pervasive Use of Educational Standards: The aLFanet Experience

Abstract

Learners have different learning styles, background knowledge, interests and alternative evolution of their learning over time, which makes ineffective offering the same packaged course to each learner. Learning should be a user-centred process focused on learning activities adapted to learner’s needs and preferences. However, authoring of adaptive courses traditionally requires massive customisations and complex design procedures. A methodological approach to support authors in designing reusable, platform independent, objective-based and adaptive courses has been defined at aLFanet project (IST-2001-33288). This proposal is only possible if educational standards (IMS-LD, IMS-MD, IMS-QTI, IMS-CP and IMS-LIP) are used. To test our approach, we have built a prototype which considers the full eLearning cycle (design, publication, use and auditing) based on pervasive use of the educational standards. In this paper, we describe the authors’ experience in aLFanet as well as the main lessons learned from running a course at UNED.