Abstract:

Over the past five years, developers of e-learning technology took up the idea again of creating the hardware necessary to obtain a substantial advance in e-learning: the personalization of learning. The idea of personalizing learning may include the simplest aspects, such as marking several alternative itineraries according to the initial conditions of the student, but also more complex ones, in which the system is continuously adapting the learning path depending on the student’s progress.

The e-learning platform MOODLE (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is familiar with this idea. In March 2008, the authors of this paper tested the usage of the “activity locking” module in version 1.8 of MOODLE, as a first attempt of personalized learning. The limitation of this module to determine the activity path for each student was evident. The next MOODLE version announces the inclusion of “conditional activities” which should allow teachers to restrict the availability of an activity to the achievement conditions of other activities, according to previous configuration by the teacher.

In the line of conditioning activities, the Conditionals developed by CICEI (Innovation Center for Information Society) of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, constitute an even greater advance than the one announced for version 2.0 of MOODLE. In June 2009, CICEI presented their latest version of Conditionals, which are prepared to run on the current operative versions of MOODLE. Our work team, I2FM (Research and Innovation in Mathematical Training), took part in the presentation mentioned above and we agreed with CICEI on the experimentation of their Conditionals in the educational environment of the university.

In this paper, we present the experiment of the I2FM group with the creation and design of a MOODLE course with CICEI Conditionals. CAM (Support Course in Mathematics) aims at first year students on Engineering or Business degrees and it has been offered at several degrees at the UJI (University Jaume I of Castellón) and the UNIZAR (University of Zaragoza). The period for student participation in CAM runs from the middle of October to the middle of December, 2009.

In the first section of this paper we present our reasons to personalize learning itineraries and we describe the educational context where they are applied. We also detail the key questions in the design of CAM such as: establishing targets and selection of learning units, organization of different learning paths and conditioning of the activities, establishing control or evaluation mechanisms, arranging online tutor mechanisms and mechanisms to find out about the opinion of the user.

Information about the starting point, the conclusions and the lessons learned from the experiment are shown in the last two sections of this paper. The close collaboration between the two groups (developers and teachers) during this experiment, will enable us to improve the technological part of the Conditionals as well as the methodological part through the design of the learning itineraries.

Keywords:

E-Learning, Mathematics, Higher education, Conditionals, LMS, Moodle.