Abstract:

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand on the e-Learning solutions was in continuous growth and was adopted widely by schools, universities and other educational institutions as well as by individual people exceeded (e.g. a language application on the smartphone) or products (e.g. an interactive tutorial in a game). The COVID-19 pandemic made the demand on the e-Learning solutions even higher and forces people worldwide, especially in the countries that are severely affected by the pandemic, to rely on those solutions as the only way that allows the learning process to continue. The shutdown of educational institutes and the lock-down stopped the human interactions which is essential for people to learn and develop themselves, especially for children and youth. Moreover, staying at home made people in general, and youth in particular less physically-active, in societies that were already facing challenges regarding the physical-activity of youth. These are accompanied by emotional trouble. Therefore, e-Learning solutions should be extended to address those issues. This paper presents an e-Learning platform that helps school students to continue their learning at home and to enrich this experience as well as to stimulate human interactions between them. It integrates different learning resources (e.g. books, laboratories, games, quizzes). The teachers can easily add new learning resources and share them with a specific student, group of students, class or with all the students of the platform. Students, can easily ask access to resources from teachers and to ask them to add additional resources to the platform. The platform enables teachers to track the evolution of each student, but also the evolution of a group of students or a class. In addition, the platform encourages students to execute physical exercises. On a daily basis, during the first class, the students will execute multiple indoor physical exercises that are provided by the platform through a game. The platform tracks the evolution of each student and provide a feedback regarding their performances. It enables teachers to visualise in real time the performance of the students and to provide guidance. Some exercises need collaboration between students to achieve a specific target in the game. To access the platform each student has a student-account and each teacher has a teacher account. Compared to the student-account, the teacher-account grants teachers access to additional tools and gives them additional privileges. Both types of accounts integrate a user profile that contains personal information about the user, his/her preferences and additional useful information (e.g. weigh, height). Some information in each student-user are automatically updated after each game, quiz and exam. The platform is multilingual and supports multimodal interactions. It integrates different adaptive and customisation features. The platform adapts its design and content according to the grade of the student and his/her preferences. Moreover, the platform adapts the level of the quizzes according to the knowledge level of the student in the topic (does not apply on the quizzes initiated by a teacher). The levels or durations of some physical exercises are adapted to the physical condition and previous performances of the student. Finally, the platform monitors the emotional status of the student and suggests different activities according to the emotional status of the student.

Keywords:

e-learning, adaptive, human interactions, multimodal interface, physical activity.