Complex Course Generation Adapted to Pedagogical Scenarios and its Evaluation

A course(ware) generator (CG) assembles a sequence of educational resources that support a student in achieving his learning goals. CG offers a middle way between pre-authored “one-size-fits-all” courseware and individual look-up of learning objects. Existing course generators however, incorporate only limited CG knowledge. They only handle a single, limited type of course and cannot handle scenarios. In this paper, we present a course generator that implements a previously unrealized amount of pedagogical knowledge. We illustrate the expressivity of this CG knowledge by describing six different scenarios. An additional novel feature is that the courses it generates are structured in sections and subsections which makes orientation and navigation easier for students. We also present the results of Europe-wide formative and summative evaluation. The evaluation investigated the students’ view on CG in general and for each scenario in particular. The data show that the realized adaptivity is appreciated by the learners and that the learner-driven usage of the course generator helps learners to find they own way of learning and makes them feel being respected, treated as adults.

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