Abstract:

Nowadays, in numerous research work on education and even on related domains, many ways of managing factors that influence learners during learning process can be found. These factors are for instance motivation, parental influence or learner’s behaviour. Some research teams tried to demonstrate how to take these factors into account to improve teaching and learning activities. However, to our knowledge, the approach of development of e-learning platforms based on these factors is almost nonexistent. Although these platforms integrate a vast number of IT(Information technology) tools, there is not anyway of knowing if factors were taken into account explicitly or implicitly during their development. In these conditions, many questions could be asked: How to identify if a factor was taken into account? Which factors may be identified by using available tools in these platforms? If a factors is not identified, what can be proposed to take into account this factor? To answer these questions, we collect factors influencing learner, mentioned in the literature, and grouped them together according their context. Some factors are well-known and are considered as the most important; they correspond to the characteristics of learners as cognitive skills, age or still learning strategies. Other are less direct but they are also important in school context, for instance parental support or extracurricular activity. We grouped these factors into six categories. We also defined an analysis method of e-learning platforms based on factors. In fact, these factors cannot be directly identified from an e-learning platform. This one is an environment that offers a set of IT tools for designing e-learning items. These tools allow for instance planning of distance courses, organization of work teams, evaluation of learners, integration of new content, etc. Then, the activities designed with the IT tools must be considered. So, our method allows us to determine the factors influencing the learner relatively to a given learning activity, which is implemented with one or many tools of a e-learning platform. This method was applied to a collaborative problem solving activity developed with the Moodle platform. We thus determined, in one hand, the different tools used for the design of this activity and, on the other hand, the factors associated to this activity. The proposed paper will present the different categories of factors, the defined analysis method and finally the example of application of this method. Our main goal is to offer solutions to enrich the learning activities by taking factors influencing learners into account. These solutions involve contribution of the different educational trends in order to provide a wide range of activities or tools intended to future teachers or course designers.

Keywords:

e-learning, platform, factor.