The education of pupils with learning difficulties is very complicated due to great variety of their specific cognitive abilities and psychological factors. It requires the use of personalized learning facilities that can help achievement of their learning goals. For that reason we design an adaptable system for development of tools on the basis of suitable pedagogical methods and learning resources. The system provides facilities for adaptation of learning units to the learning profile of each pupil. The substantial elements of this adaptation technique are carried out by activities of the resource-developer. The paper presents an approach to a description of these activities supported by the adaptable system. The adaptation bases on reusable learning units that can be modified in correspondence with the learner's profile, learning context or scenario.
There are many electronic educational systems but for the purposes of school education almost nothing has been done in this regard. Rarely as it may be, elearning can be found in secondary schools. However teachers don’t utilise modern ICT in primary school. Long ago children in kindergartens have been playing on computers, but this interesting “thing” is not set to work in educational process. The reason probably is the difficulty of creating appropriate educational products for young children, because their teaching requires not only a mechanical "dumping" of useful information and knowledge. The learning process is much more complex and includes structured presentation of the learning material in appropriate form and appearance consistent with age and background.
From another point of view, the education in primary school comes across other important problem – certain characteristics of the individuals might hamper them to acquire basic skills such as reading, writing, arithmetic. Many children still lag behind in this early stage of their education not because they are stupid or lazy (common labels), but because they have a special way of perceiving and processing information. These children do not receive teaching adequate to their abilities, the education system rejects them, and society loses specialists with valuable qualities simply because the school failed to discover and develop these qualities on time. Typical examples are children with dyslexia (dyscalculia, dysgraphia), with ADHS and ADS, even with autism.
Dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia are disorders in the
development of school skills, which are classified in
the medical registers, though they are not diseases.
The perceiving of environment signals and their
processing in the brain shows a specificity that can
lead to some distortion of the information and to
confusion. For example, in contrast to other people
the dyslexics think mostly in pictures [
According to state requirements such children should be integrated together with the others, but they need individual curricula, extra special trained teachers, etc. The aim is to achieve individualization in the teaching process, using pupil’s strong skills and personal qualities, and through appropriate exercises to support and develop the weak ones.
(cognitive) difficulties need special education. It
could be achieved by development of e-learning
system [
Early screening and identification of Individual curricula, personal children with learning difficulties teaching assistant
environment (comfortable, without stress and frustration)
The development of personalized e-learning facilities requires design of adaptable e-learning system that supports production and delivery of learning resources. We suggest a conceptual model of such adaptable e-learning system shown on Figure 1.
The learner’s profile represents cognitive abilities and psychological characteristics. It defines a learning style and appropriate pedagogical methods and tools. The determination of the cognitive abilities depends on the following important characteristics, which are derived during psychological testing: • Memorizing (short term and long term memory), • Attention, • Concentration, • Absorption capacity, • Observing ability, • Working capacity, • Orientation, Coordination, Balance, • Motor functions (fine motor skills), • Communication skills, • Handling abstract terms and symbols, • Way of thinking – in terms (“sequential”) / in pictures (“quasi parallel”).
Some significant psychological features that have influence on the learning process are self-assessment, imagination, patience, excitability and emotionality. All these characteristics could be easily assessed by computerized psychological tests. They should be in the form of amusing games or entertaining tasks in order to prevent stress and frustration, so that children could do their best. The results and indicators are the basis for the psychological profile of the pupil. This profile determines the teaching style, methods and tools which serve to arrange and to accomplish the education process in the most appropriate way.
The pedagogical room consists of pedagogical
methods and pedagogical tools that are in
correspondence with the learning style. The most
commonly used pedagogical methods are:
• Informational – the teaching is performed using
“instructions”. Key elements of this method are
the messages and the symbols.
• Phenomenological – the knowledge is build up
as an event. It is accepted and absorbed through
senses and emotions [
strong / weak
Contextualization
defines Learning Styles s d l i u b
Pedagogical Room
Methods e n i m r e t e d implemented New-Composed Units supplied d e s u
supplied
Existing Units R e u s e a b l e
L e a r n i n g
U n i t s Children with dyslexia are predisposed to learn mostly by the phenomenological method as they can observe the action and get a real idea of the phenomenon. At the same time they can form an emotional connection with the subject matter, which helps focusing attention and supports the memorizing.
The pedagogical format describes the way of knowledge presentation in the learning units. It is built on the basis of the selected pedagogical methods and tools in compliance with pupils’ learning style.
The system allows access to learning units stored in
databases or repositories. These resources can be
modified, adapted and reused in a process of
composition of new learning units according to the
given pedagogical format [
According to the Figure 1, the psychological test detects the strong and week points of cognitive abilities that have to be underlined in the learner’s profile. Subject domain contains knowledge about the learning subject(s) (reading, writing, language, mathematics, etc.). It gives the criteria for selecting the appropriate personal features from the learner’s profile. On that basis the learning style is determined and the pedagogical methods and tools are chosen. As above mentioned, those are the factors for building the pedagogical format. The latter serves as a frame for composing learning units. The activities regarding constructing of pedagogical formats and learning units are supported by the ICT-based authoring tool. Considering the methodological recommendations and employing the authoring tool, teachers create new learning units, reuse the existing ones or edit, update them and save for future application. Each learning unit done according to the above described procedure is contextualized with regard to the local specifics and learner’s preferences. Thus, the composed unit is ready for use.
The functional model of e-learning system can be
represented as composed of three parts [
• To have sufficient technical tools in order to meet the requirements for diverse presentations of the learning matters including sounds, pictures, movies, clips, animations etc. s t n e r a P s l i p u P s l a n o i s s e f o r P
goals to be obtained
methodology Implementation layer: authoring tool s t c e j b u S s l l i k S s e i t i l i b A g s inh odh ca te eT M
Records of the learning process (task – solution – attempts – errors) n o i t a u l a v E n o i t a t p a d
A
s e l y t S g n i n r a e L e c n e r e f n I n o fo ita ep in y m T a x E n o i t i s o p m o C n o i t a t n e s e r P n o i t a z i l a n o s r e P
modelling and design of 3D objects.
resources – learning units, learning facilities.
5.1. Users Among the above mentioned essentials, such a system must have very specific features and characteristics that meet the requirements and perform functions of different types of users:
methodologists, teachers and speech therapists),
and to some games and entertainment, which they receive as bonuses and rewards in order to be stimulated to deal with the material. It should be noted that the stimulus should only be positive; i.e. there shouldn’t be penalties.
their children and in case they could support children in their training. Also they can share ideas, impressions and experiences in parental forums.
the children’s training from the professionals.
Professionals have greater access rights to the system. On the one hand, they must monitor the training process in order to record and analyse the mastering of learning material. Future steps in the learning path are determined by these records and analysis (adaptation). On the other hand, they also participate in the forums – both professional and popular. In the first case they share their problems, ideas, solutions, tips, experiences, arrange conferences. In the latter case, they give advices and suggestions at "common level" in communication with parents, who generally are not experts in the matter.
The ICT platform consists of three layers – intentional, conceptual and implementation. The intention layer presents learning goals that have to be achieved and are built-in parameters of the elearning system. Those specify the knowledge, skills and abilities (in one or several subjects) that must be acquired, in compliance with the government regulations.
goals are presented in the conceptual layer. According to the personal profile of the child the appropriate pedagogical method(s) are selected and implemented so as to achieve the learning goals efficiently. Furthermore, this profile serves for determination of the learning style and gives guidelines for the choice of relevant modes and forms of the examination. The latter shouldn’t be distressful and upsetting, but motivating the pupils to do their best.
Methodologists consider motivation and learner’s activity as the most important elements for successful learning strategy. In order to awake the children’s activity it is necessary to engage them in the learning process, which could be done best through the emotional connection with the learning matter. Motivation can be provoked by presenting the subject clearly and precisely so as to be understood and absorbed quickly enough. Thus the accomplishment of learning tasks with noticeable results forces the motivation and heightens the selfesteem and self-confidence of the child.
The implementation layer includes diverse instruments that serve to gain the learning objectives identified in the intention layer. Modern technologies provide a huge range of capabilities to assist to the full extent the creation of learning units using different pedagogical formats. The latter are implemented by the specially designed authoring tool.
Professionals use this authoring tool to compose learning resources. It supports various functions – development, structuring, reusing and adaptation of learning units, so as to carry out different learning courses and scenarios. In order to meet the necessities of the pupils, determined by their individual cognitive characteristics, the authoring tool must allow adaptation of learning units, regarding the following aspects: • Volume, • Presentation (through different types of media – illustrations, simulations), • Contextualization: o Content Localization – language, custom, traditions, etc., o
Fine Tuning – font, colour, size; etc.
The interaction part of the system contains a database for every child's reactions (assigned tasks, provided solutions, performed attempts, made errors). On this basis, the professionals can determine the level of the acquired knowledge and infer how to continue the learning path. Besides the above mentioned the system provides opportunities to exchange information – opinions, ideas, plans, experiences, tips – between the different type of users on the one hand and among peers on the other. Therefore the professionals outline and arrange guidelines for both the further development and assembling of learning units and any necessary adaptations to the specific needs of the pupils.
The children with dyslexia (one of the common
learning difficulties) need visual representation of
every single conception in order to understand its
meaning. That is why they have difficulty with
prepositions, adverbs and similar words. Therefore
a phenomenological approach is applied for solving
such problems. The Davis’ method [
(clay), or formed using ICT-based tools (e.g. Google SketchUp 6, TopMod3d, etc.). In addition the modelled word has to be written. In this way the child obtains an integral idea of the word: meaning, image and spelling and is able to understand and use it properly. The example on Figure 3 shows the process of building the conception of the adverb “backwards”.
The presented e-learning system exploits effectively ICT for gaining better educational results for all pupils. Obviously, pupils with learning difficulties have characteristics and perceptions that distinguish them from the other pupils. These differences vary in some extent and cause specific knowledge processing. For that reason such pupils demand personalized education.
abilities and corresponding learning style. This approach is of benefit for all the children as well, but it is crucial for these with learning difficulties as dyslexics.
adaptation of learning units for learners who need special education is very complicated and fatigue process, which requires additional teachers’ abilities. Hence ICT-based authoring tools are badly needed and of vital importance nowadays.
integrates ICT tools for: • Collaboration between professionals, • Facilities supporting the learning process, • Creation, reusing and adaptation of learning units.
Furthermore, the system performs a technique for personalisation of learning units in correspondence with the learners’ profile of each pupil. All this activities integrated in such a system not only make easier and optimize the teachers’ work, but contribute to achieving efficient learning process.