Autonomous Student Modelling in Learning Management Systems

Student modelling refers to representation of students’ goals, capabilities, preferences, and various other personal and social characteristics that are of interest, and reasoning in terms of the student’s knowledge, expectations, personalization, and decisions. The very nature of modelling students necessitates that the model be autonomous. In this research, we explored a generic architecture for student modelling and resolved issues concerning the model being autonomous in the context of Learning Management Systems (LMS). Introduction User modelling refers to representation of users ’ goals, capabilities, preferences, and various other personal and social characteristics that are of interest, and reasoning in terms of the user’s knowledge, expectations, personalization, and decisions. A student model is a derivative of a user model which represents and reasons about issues related to students. Student models play a particularly critical role in sustaining learning in blended online educational environments, where many of the activities of the students can be autonomously tracked (with their consent) and used as input for the models. IEEE’s Public and Private Information for Learners (PAPI), in an effort to standardize, capture, and process information related to students , advocates attributes such as personal, relation, security, preference, performance, and portfolio to symbolize student models (IEEE 2000). Information that provides input to these attributes includes learning objectives as concept maps, learning models, pedagogy, students’ workload characterizations, interaction across multiple student assessments, teamwork characterizations, accessibility considerations, structured and unstructured student activities, content modelling, cognitive analysis, and students’ learning styles.