The GRAPPLE Project
The GRAPPLE project (Generic Responsive Adaptive
Personalized Learning Environment) aims at delivering to
learners a Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) environment that
guides them through a life-long learning experience,
automatically adapting to personal preferences, prior
knowledge, skills and competences, learning goals and the
personal or social context in which the learning takes place.
The same TEL environment can be used/accessed at home, school,
work or on the move (using mobile/handheld devices). GRAPPLE
includes authoring tools that enable educators to provide
adaptive learning material to the learners, including adaptive
interactive components (visualizations, simulations, virtual
reality). Authoring includes creating or importing content,
assigning or extracting meaning from that content, designing
learning activities and defining pedagogical properties of and
adaptation strategies for the content and activities. To ensure
the wide adoption of adaptation in TEL GRAPPLE works with
several Open Source and commercial Learning Management Systems
(LMSs).
The core technoloties used in this project are: a) graphical
authoring tools for creating a conceptual representation of an
adaptive application (or course text), b) a powerful generic
adaptive delivery engine, also called GRAPPLE Adaptive Learning
Environment (GALE), which is looselyintegrated into different
LMSs in a generic way, c) a distributed GRAPPLE User Model
Framework (GUMF) to enable different components to share user
model information (used for adaptation), d) a communication
infrastructure for the different components, built around the
GRAPPLE event bus, and e) a single sign-on facility based on
Shibboleth.
Within GRAPPLE 15 partners are working together to make
adaptive course delivery become a reality for teachers (and
institutes) using a variety of LMSs. Several LMS suppliers are
in the consortium to ensure that this potential is actually
realized and reaches the market. So the tutorial will teach you
how to create adaptive courses using technology that will
actually become available within LMSs in the near future.
Target Audience
This tutorial is mainly aimed at educators who wish to start
offering adaptive course material. The Adaptive Learning
Environment GALE can be used independent of an LMS (or other
GRAPPLE components) so also educators whose institute does not
use a (supported) LMS can make use of GALE. The tutorial is
also interesting for researchers who wish to study adaptive
course delivery methods and techniques and may wish to use the
GRAPPLE environment (or just GALE) as a base technology to
build their own extensions on. The software is open source and
very extensible.
Tutorial Topics
- During this tutorial we will learn to define a domain
model (DM) for a course, consisting of concepts with
properties, and semantic relationships. (The domain model
is comparable to an ontology.) Pedagogical relationships
between concepts, such as prerequisites, can be defined (as
concept relationship types) and used to define a conceptual
adaptation model (CAM). In GRAPPLE a course (or parts of a
course) can be created in different ways (which we will all
try out):
- An author can define page templates with placeholders for
different information fragments or objects. Each concept
has properties defining the content for these information
fragments (either defining text or specifying the URI of a
file containing the information). Courses created this way
have a uniform structure, (or a number of presentation
structures) but the fragments may be conditionally included
(or excluded) depending on the needs of the learner.
- An author can write entire pages and associate them to
concepts. This allows every page to be differently
structured (or unstructured). Pages can contain
conditionally included fragments or objects.
- In GRAPPLE courses are presented as hypermedia, which
means that learning objects or information pages are
connected through links. These links are adaptively
annotated depending on their suitability for the learner.
As an author you can define how the link annotation works
and how it is presented to the learner. You can also define
an overall layout, adding automatically generated parts
such as an (accordion) navigation menu.
- Besides creating the conceptual and pedagogical structure
of a course in this tutorial we also learn how to serve the
course through some of the supported LMSs. The GRAPPLE
adaptation engine GALE works with the open source LMSs
Moodle, Sakai and Claroline (and with some commercial
systems not shown during the tutorial). Learning performed
within GALE is visible within the LMS and activities within
the LMS (like taking a test or getting grades for an
assignment) can influence the adaptation that happens in
GALE. We learn how to set up the User Model Framework GUMF
to define the communication between the LMS and GALE in
terms of data transformations that may be needed.
About the Tutor: Prof. dr. Paul De Bra
Paul De Bra is full professor at the Eindhoven University of
Technology (Eindhoven, the Netherlands). He has initiated
research in adaptive hypermedia leading up to the most
referenced AHAM reference model for adaptive hypermedia and the
most widely used open source AHA! adaptive hypermedia system.
He is also the initiator and coordinator of the GRAPPLE
project. He has many years of experience in teaching about
adaptive systems and in training authors of adaptive courses
(formerly using AHA!, but as of now using the GRAPPLE
environment).
Vital information for attendees
Attendees of this tutorial must register through the EC-TEL
conference website. In order to participate actively in the
hands-on parts of the tutorial the attendees should bring their
own (laptop) computer. The GRAPPLE software can be installed
and used on Windows, MacOS X and different flavors of
Unix/Linux. Attendees will receive detailed handouts and access
to on-line adaptive training material.
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