Abstract:

During the last decades the Learning Management Systems (LMS) has changed the way that people learn or train. LMSs are used in every level of education or training. In this article we present the work done on the “Body and Mind Academy” project, where an open source Training Management System (TMS) was designed and developed to support physical and mental training. Our TMS is based on an open source LMS, which was expanded and customized so it could function as a hybrid TMS, providing increased functionality for administrators and trainers.

TMS’s interface was designed in such a way in order to achieve natural, transparent, ludic and spontaneous user interaction. The system enables trainers to create personal learning paths for each trainee.

The micro-training technique is used to increase:
(a) trainees’ comprehension of learning paths and
(b) trainers' flexibility to design individual training programs. In this respect the adopted techniques increase efficiency, effectiveness and productivity of our TMS system. In order to reduce trainers' workload, an administrator of the TMS can create prototype lessons with all available material (video, serious games, etc.), from which the trainer can select, clone and use according to the needs of the trainees’ group. The TMS uses gamification techniques to motivate trainees to follow the program and increase their engagement. The TMS was given for testing and debugging to an elderly group from which we gathered usage results.

Acknowledgement:
The work done in the Body & Mind Project was funded with support from the European Commission. This is a KA2 Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership with reference 2017-1-PL01-KA204-038565.

Keywords:

Training Management System, Body Training, Mind Training, Game Based Learning, Gamification, Micro-Training, Personalized Learning Paths.