Implementing Personalized e-Learning Environments: Just Do It

       Personalized e-Learning Environments: Considering Students' Contexts (Eyharabide, et al. 2009) was a chapter covered at the 2009 World Conference on Computers in Education in Brazil. The chapter discusses a case study whose goal was to improve e-learning by personalizing it to the user's contexts. The authors believe “an improvement in the user’s contextual information leads to a better understanding of users’ behavior in order to adapt the content, the interface, and the assistance offered to users” (Eyharabide,et al. 2009).

       Context is a description of aspects of a situation like physical location or the temperature of the room. In e-learning, there are four contexts to consider: personal, cultural, technological and pedagogical. Personal context may include a student's age, background or user profile while cultural context can include things like language, social norms, gender or ethnic aspects. Technological context can include things like device processing power, Internet availability and operating system. Finally, pedagogical context includes things like user knowledge, learning styles and personality.

      Imagine: one student logs onto his college's learning system, where his college notes are read to him in his native language and you-tube videos that support his class material are offered for watching at his convenience while another student across town watches a power-point presentation from class that was downloaded to her cell phone while waiting for a dentist appointment. Using contextualized e-learning, both of these scenarios are possible for the same student.

      Unfortunately, just as context cannot exist without an entity, contextualized e-learning cannot exist without an institution to implement it. Implementation starts with better education for the educators expected to use the program. And when deciding the best method for the educators, may we suggest a contextualized e-learning environment?

References:

Eyharabide, V., et al. (2009). Personalized e-learning environments: considering students’ contexts. Brazil: Retrieved from http://link.springer.com.dml.regis.edu/book/10.1007/978-3-642-03115-1/page/1

Images from:

Michael