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Keywords
Education, Multimedia, Learning, Modeling
Abstract
Researchers frequently come across teachers who distrust a learning environment as embodying the beliefs of the designers and not their own pedagogy. Following the lead provided by user modelling work carried out in the field of human-computer interaction, there has been much research on student modelling and adaptivity to individual learners; however, the role of the teacher as the manager of the learning process and hence a much more significant user of a learning environment has been ignored. This paper discusses the need for a human teacher model in any computer-based learning environment and recommends configurable, incremental and re-structurable contributive learning environments (CIRCLE) architecture to ensure wider acceptance and greater reuse of the phenomenal creative effort that goes into designing a good learning environment.
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Introduction
The addition of multimedia objects such as sound clips, pictures and animations to the traditional text-based learning environments (LE) can provide an enhanced learning experience due to the possibility of employing multiple representations for the content and providing rich background information (Patel et al., in press). However, the situation is quite complex in the sense that it is the novice learners who are likely to benefit most from the multiple stimulus provided by richer representations, and yet it is this group of learners who are most likely to get distracted in the absence of directed learning as they may not have developed adequate meta-cognitive skills of setting learning goals, monitoring progress and changing learning strategies where necessary. Different teachers would therefore direct the process of learning by constraining it in different ways, for example, defining an appropriate grain size of learning and level of abstraction through selecting a top-down or bottom-up approach for accessing the contents and also through controlling the amount of contextual information (Kinshuk and Patel, in press).
The benefits of reusability are widely known and accepted to need re-iteration. However, many of the early promises of time and cost savings have not materialised due to a variety of reasons (Coatta, 2000). As Coatta observed, only trivial pieces of code can be taken...