Abstract:

The internet is the medium for distributing content more efficiently anywhere, anytime. Learning in the 21st century is becoming ubiquitous and personalized due to the huge demand for distant learning. The traditional learning system is too restricting for modern students. These students need to multi-task and manage their time. University College Dublin (UCD) has made a unique transition from its once traditional education metaphor to an increasingly modularized educational framework; the first of its kind in Ireland.

UCD adopted a modularised, credit-based educational system known as UCD Horizon that provides adaptive learning. Ubiquitous access to the vast array of resources available throughout each school of the university has been facilitated through the establishment of a fast and efficient wireless local area network. This offers great opportunity for mobile clients' users and e-learning facility. The vast scale of the undergraduate community undertaking third level courses at the university requires access to the numerous resources available across each distinct school hence resources must be seamlessly integrated into one learning management system. UCD provided managed learning environments (MLEs) that acts as resource repository and also as an intelligent learning environment that aids students through their learning stages. These MLEs lack personalisation, efficiency, and interoperability.

Majority of the services the MLEs provide, such as collaborative learning, are redundant because tutors and students are not making use of them. The skills learnt to use one MLE is not transferable to other mobile learning environments. The existing MLEs are designed for clients such as desktop computers and notebooks hence it's not ubiquitous enough. Furthermore, these MLEs don't offer personalised content that can help these students easily navigate to useful material in accordance to their interest and academic strength.

To enhance UCD's current MLEs, a single supported learning environment, personalised ubiquitous learning platform (PULP), is proposed and designed to provide personalised content, activities and services. Furthermore it aims to promote collaborating learning by supporting collaborative interactions and personal learning environments. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss how PULP incorporated adaptive learning and content to enhance mobile, social and collaborative learning in a ubiquitous learning environment for third level education.

The paper will focus on a ubiquitous learning platform that is designed to embody the qualities of managed learning environments, adaptive personalization, social network and content reusability. It will discuss information filtering for user modelling and focus on how the platform provides social and collaborative learning for enhanced learning experience.

Keywords:

Adaptive personalisation, adaptive learning, collaborative learning, social learning.