Integrating Product Line and Learning Style Approaches to Enforce Reusability and Personalization of Learning Objects

Abstract

The growing use of information technologies in the educational cycles has raised new requirements for the development of Personalized Learning Materials in terms of content reuse, customization, ease of creation and efficiency of production. In practical terms, the goal is the development of tools for creating reusable, granular, durable, and interoperable Learning Objects (LO), and to compose such objects into meaningful courseware pieces. Several LO development tools require special technical skills in the instructors to exploit reuse and customization features. In addition, the absence of study of the learner's characteristics in the LO authoring process leads sometimes to produce learning materials that don't meet learners' needs and preferences. In this paper, we explore a new way to reuse and personalization based on two principles. First, we have applied product linebased document engineering tools to create the so-called Learning Object Authoring Tool (LOAT), which supports the development and the personalization of learning materials following the Cisco's Reusable Information Object strategy. And second, we used ontologies to provide instructors with extensive knowledge about the learner's characteristics and recommends materials that fits Learners' learning style to increase reuse of learning content.