PERSEX, A PROGRAMABLE TOOL FOR PERSONAL LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT
1 University of Cadiz (SPAIN)
2 I.E.S. Estuaria (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Conference name: 1st International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 6-8 July, 2009
Location: Barcelona ,Spain
Abstract:
In education, there exist many resources for teaching, mainly in written form. To date, the enourmous amount of books and educational documentation have generally satisfied the needs of professor and students for teaching and learning, and educational materials are demonstrated to get the standard quality for each level, both in content and format. However, more and more a customized student-centred teaching is demanded to professors and this claim requires from them more flexibility in the use of the teaching resources. Additionally, modern educational methodologies are less exigent in relation to the length and depth of content of documents and they usually work well with loosely structured books.
Also, the use of the Virtual Campus is becoming progressively more generalised at all the levels of university education; thus, it is required to get available more and better educational instruments for learning and assessment. This last element is the one that causes more rejection among the teaching staff by the difficulty of its preparation in a virtual context, the distrust about the online assessment procedure and the lack of simplicity and trustworthy methods of assessment through the Virtual Campus. However, the educative platforms are providing some personalized and reliable forms of assessment, but there is a hard way to run for a generalized acceptance and verified efficiency of its use.
In this work Persex is presented, a tool for the automatic generation of personal learning documentation, exercises and assessments.
Based on Latex as scientific text processor and helped by a high level programming language, Persex facilitates the programmable generation of documentation, featuring high quality, customized and loosely structured issues. With the aid of a simple and easy-to-use metalanguage, it can be applied to any matter. This tool broadens the catalogue of available resources for teachers and may be a short step to advance towards the practice of personal education.
Keywords:
innovation, technology, student centered approach, latex.