Research Activity

[Tools and environnement for e-learning]

[An approach for learning objects' properties assessment]

 

Tools and environnement for e-learning

With the growth  of Internet and the spread of new technologies of information and communication, we have to respond to a huge demand of new educational approaches and tools. One response is the  Web-based education or e-learning. This new way of teaching is getting an increasing popularity due to its numerous benefits: it permits to gain the potentials of immediacy, relevance, interactivity, authenticity, etc.

However, the arisen of this way of education needs new didactic models. Both pedagogical and technological aspects must be carefully reviewed. From a pedagogical perspective, it is necessary to develop new training models that clearly define how to organize new training paths and how to present their content in a way that will benefit the user.  As for the technological aspect, new tools for distributing knowledge must be created: tools that are able to reproduce as accurately as possible the pedagogical training models.

Consequently, the demand for intelligent system that makes teaching in distance learning environments more efficient and adaptive is increasing. In such systems, students can have customized working spaces.

In this context, our team works on both pedagogical  and scientific (research) aspects.

In order to explore the different aspects of the e-learning, and to analyze how it can be efficiently performed, we conduct e-learning experiences. We develop courses and we teach them by use of  our own  Web-based platform,   that provides a learning management system and a range of content creation and publication tools. We, also,  perform two kinds of analysis of our e-learning  experiences : analysis of user’s appreciation (by mean of questionnaires distributed to both students and teachers) and analysis of statistical data delivered by the platform. The results analysis permit us to perform our research

The object of current works of the  research team is to improve efficiency of e-learning by  introducing intelligence into e-learning environments and  automating a set of its features (e-mail return, student profile determination, dynamic course generation, online assessment of student and generation of course material at the student level)

An approach for learning objects' properties assessment

New research fields are emerged as consequence of the huge adoption of e-learning in academic and non-academic contexts. One of those research fields are the quality insurance on learning process within an e-learning context.

Our research work is related to this problematic especially concerning “learning objects” as one of the most strategic concepts in e-learning. In fact, it’s have an interesting particularity that is its presence in almost all of e-learning strategies (online/blended, synchronous/asynchronous, etc.).

In this context we work actually in an approach providing a way to describe “good” properties for learning objects. Our research cover too the study of possible mechanisms to make a matching between a learning object and a set of “good properties” covering its different life cycles (conception, publication and use).

research activity