CRETAL: A Personalized Learning Environment in Conventional Setup

The increased variety of learning resources, like e-books with modern collaborative tools, video lectures of different teachers across the world, lively discussion boards etc. have substantially affected learning styles of students. Having accepted such forms of learning materials, conventional academic setups are in desperate need to make learning activities efficient, effective and meaningful. In this paper a diverse resources hosting system CRETAL (Compiler of Resources in Engineering &Technology to Aid Learning) with rich set of unique annotation tools are described to address the challenges of the modern students to query, access, extract, connect, process and share the important concepts from the different form of the learning materials created and adapted by the teacher. In addition to the system description, we also present the usability study along with the impact on students learning and teacher's decision when CRETAL was adapted in few undergraduate course using Educational Data mining and learning analytics.