-
Home
-
European Projects
-
Generic Responsive Adaptive Personalized Learning .. (GRAPPLE)
Generic Responsive Adaptive Personalized Learning Environment
(GRAPPLE)
Start date: Feb 1, 2008,
End date: Jan 31, 2011
PROJECT
FINISHED
Description
GRAPPLE has delivered a truly generic and extensible technical infrastructure to support life-long adaptive learningProject GoalTo deliver to learners a technology-enhanced learning environment that guides them through a life-long learning experience, automatically adapting to personal preferences, prior knowledge, skills and competences, learning goals and the personal or social context in which the learning takes place. To achieve this goal GRAPPLE has developed the following: A common abstract description of desired adaptive behaviour, using conceptual adaptation models, and a 'translation' to lower level adaptation rules that can be used by actual adaptation engines. Authoring tools to define conceptual adaptation models, capturing relationships between concepts that are of a navigational and/or pedagogical nature, e. g. prerequisite relationships. In order to 'package' a learning application consisting of domain-dependent information and conceptual adaptation models, extensions to standards will be proposed that can represent all required information to port learning applications between different adaptive learning environments. A general purpose adaptation engine that can adapt any (xml) information, either as part of a pipeline from source to user-interface, or as a stand-alone adaptive learning environment that performs adaptation and complete user-interface presentation. User modelling services that keep track of each user's learning process in order to provide input to the adaptation engine to base the adaptation on. A distributed user modelling architecture will be designed and developed to link different adaptive learning environments and user modelling services together, and to perform retrieval and reasoning over user modelling information coming from different services. Final ResultsThe main result of the project is a generic learning environment, integrated with five different Learning Management Systems (LMS) in order to enable adaptive life-long learning for learners in higher education and industry. The GRAPPLE architecture consists of:LMS, for managing the learning process, progress and support, GALE, an Adaptive Learning Environment, for the adaptive delivery of learning material; support of learning itself, GUMF, a generic User Model Framework, for collecting and maintaining the information about each learner from all possible sources in order to help the personalisation offered by GALE, GEB, a generic Event Bus, that facilitates asynchronous information exchange between all GRAPPLE components, GAT, a graphical authoring tool, for defining the adaptation by course authors, a single sign-on facility that ensures that all GRAPPLE components recognize the learner through a single identity.The generic nature of the infrastructure has been exemplified by developing a number of extensions: visualisation tools that help learners and teachers to get overviews of their learning progress (or that of their students), adaptation to courses that employ Virtual Reality, and adaptation in learning through simulations.The adaptive functionalities are integrated in different existing LMSs, either open source (Moodle, Claroline, Sakai) or proprietary systems aimed at corporate learning applications (realised by GRAPPLE's industry partners). This ensures that GRAPPLE can easily be integrated with LMSs that have not been used by the project.An evaluation framework was set up and used extensively to validate the usability and effectiveness of adding adaptive behaviour to learning applications, in higher education and in corporate settings.