Implementation and Management Approach

ALICE is a project co-funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. It is aimed to define models, methodologies and prototype software components able to solve some of the most relevant problems of current e-learning systems and tools such as:

• lack of Interaction: most times the only interaction available is to click on "next" button to step through the material presented
• lack of Challenge: unchallenging material makes the learning experience unattractive and discourages progression
• lack of Empowerment: the learner expects to control the learning experience, while, often, the learning experience controls and limits the learner
• lack of Social Identity: the learner is often isolated from his/her peers reducing the collaboration and the learning achieved through social interaction.

ALICE will contribute to overcoming these limitations in specific contexts like instruction of scientific topics and training about emergency and civil defence.

To do that the ALICE project will provide answers to the following questions:

• How is it possible to create collaboration conditions and therefore to encourage the learner to choose a collaborative-type education when collaboration is actually difficult?
• How can the effectiveness of learning actions be supported by interactive simulations and serious games that may be created with low costs thanks to techniques of reusability?
• In what way can the storytelling be integrated with Learning Experiences having contents of different types?
• Eventually, how to create a learning additivity related to the earlier themes, being not the simple sum of various aspects, but a real integration and subsequent super-additivity with respect to single components?

The Starting Point

IWT will constitute the technological basis and the reference platform for this project. This means that models, methodologies, learning resources and software tools that will be here defined and developed will be thought to be integrated in IWT for experimentation purposes. IWT logical architecture is divided into three main layers.

The first layer is the framework used by developers to design and implement core services, application services and learning applications. The second layer is composed of core services providing basic IWT features like resource management, workflow management, information extraction, ontology storing, user authentication, content storing, metadata management, role and membership management, learning customisation, logging and profiling and data mining. Core services are used by application services and learning applications.

Application services are services to be used as building blocks to compose e-learning applications for specific domains. They include document management, conferencing, authoring, learning management, learning content management, ontology management, communication and collaboration, business intelligence, process management and information search services. Applications represent complex solutions covering specific learning scenario obtained as integration of application services.

IWT architecture is modular enough to allow the deployment of solutions capable to cover application scenarios of different complexity and for different domains by composing service building blocks.

Basing on these features, IWT will be part of the ALICE solution. In particular, starting from IWT, the results expected by the project can be summed up in the following key points:

• extension of the IWT adaptivity with the capability of managing feedbacks received from the emotional-affective interaction learner-system;
• extension of IWT collaboration and communication skills, with specific attention to virtualized collaboration;
• assessment of new learning paradigms, guided by interactive-experiential approaches, but based on storytelling and serious games;
• experimentation of new paradigms of assessment distributed along the learning process and realised, thanks to advanced resources;
• generation of learning resources able to assess the progress done in the learning process about scientific themes and the cognitive impact after learning experiences enabling to integrate and manage aspects like adaptivity, driven not only by aspects of learner personalisation, user profiling, knowledge and didactic modelling but also by emotional/affective aspects and storytelling.

Pilots

Science Teaching at University

• Teaching of scientific topics (e.g. mathematics and physics)

Emergency and civil defence training in secondary schools

• Training students of secondary schools about actions and procedures to be performed in case of emergency (e.g. the behaviour to take at a personal and collective level when the threat of a big risk shows up)

Technology solution

ALICE-defined models and methodologies will be used as a basis to develop prototype software components that will be integrated in an already existing e-Learning platform named IWT (Intelligent Web Teacher).

IWT is a "modular" user-centred virtual environment, based on the explicit knowledge representation, that allows users to arrange and perform "customized" scenarios, adapted to individual users' specific needs and characteristics, to improve the knowledge transfer and sharing through collaborative environments, social networking, community, integration of calculus, simulation and virtual reality tools and competency management.  

More specifically, IWT is a complete e-learning and knowledge management platform whose aim is to fill the lack of support for flexibility and extensibility in existing e-learning systems. IWT arises from the consideration that every learning/training context requires its own specific solution. It is not realistic to use the same application for teaching, for instance, foreign languages at primary schools, mathematical analysis at university and marketing management to enterprise employees.

It should be not only the content that varies but also the didactic model, the typology of the training modules to be used, the application layout and the supporting tools. In practice, the need to introduce the e-learning in a new learning/training context is hard work for engineers, teachers and providers of learning resources. IWT solves this problem with a modular and extensible solution able to become the foundation for building up a virtually infinite set of applications for e-learning.

IWT can deliver personalized courses which take into account the learners' previous knowledge and preferences, allowing each learner to learn only the required concepts through the most feasible learning resources. In this way, IWT manages to improve the quality of the learning reducing both the time of the learning process and the courses authoring phase. Indeed, the teacher is asked to simply select learning objectives and let IWT arrange a personalized course for each enrolled learner. IWT guarantees such a feature through the adoption of three integrated models: the Knowledge Model, the Learner Model and the Didactic Model.

• The Knowledge Model is able to formally represent the information associated to the available didactic resources. In particular it allows the teachers to define and structure disciplinary domains by constructing domain dictionaries (including relevant concepts), and ontologies (organising concepts through different Core Services Application Services kind of relations). Ontologies are used in synergy with metadata associated to the learning resources in order to allow the dynamic personalization of learning paths and the automatic evaluation of the students (gaps and competencies evaluation and assessment).
• The Learner Model is able to capture the knowledge acquired by each learner during learning activities as well as his/her learning preferences (considered as cognitive abilities and perceptive capabilities) with respect to important pedagogical parameters such as: kind of media, didactic approach, interaction level, semantic density, etc.
• The Didactic Model defines the rules that the system must follow in order to build the best sequence of learning activities to be performed by a specific learner in order to let him/her acquire the selected domain concepts with respect to his/her learner model and according to a given knowledge model.

Born from the integration and the industrialization of results coming from several national and European research and development projects, IWT is currently adopted by several enterprises and organizations as well as from departments and faculties of many Italian Universities. Thanks to the proposed innovations IWT also won the prize "Best Practices for Innovation" in November 2007 from the General Confederation for Italian Industry.