When this project started, the focus was the students' cognitive process when interacting with learning resources. Seeing the learning process as an integration of both an internal psychological process of acquisition and elaboration and an external interaction process between the learner and the environment, we see the necessity of expanding the vision and taking on a more holistic view to include this environment. Especially when introducing an AI system for adapting the learning process to an individual learner through machine learning, this AI system should consider both the internal and external agents and artifacts.
Therefore, the research focuses on which agents and artifacts to include in the analysis.
? What to measure (i.e., which attributes) to get a complete situational awareness?
? How to measure the identified attributes (i.e., which metrics to utilize)?
? How to measure dissimilarity between situations (i.e., vectors of the identified dissimilarities)?
? How to cluster the different situations (i.e., identifying suitable algorithms).
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Obtaining a quality education is fundamental both for our society with respect to the global challenges we are exposed to, for the foundation to creating sustainable development, and for any business in today's competitive world. In addition to improving quality of life, access to inclusive education can help equip locals with the tools required to develop innovative solutions to the world's greatest problems. The question is therefore how to improve learning, within the opportunities and constraints of the UN's sustainable development goals, and at the same time streamline and facilitate the learning process both for the student, a possible lecturer and the learning institution.
As stated in Myers and Myers (1980), though, "One of the great frustrations of teaching is that you are always robbing Peter to pay Paul". When designing an education program to reach one group of students, lecturers know that in so doing they are going to turn off another group. Most lecturers have experienced that diversity is upon us. Textbooks taking this into account, i.e. adapting to the knowledge and personality of the reader, should therefore facilitate and improve the learning process ("the meshing hypothesis").
Terp has the goal to accomplish this in cooperation with our collaborators The Norwegian Computing Center and University of Stavanger by utilising a new concept of learning material; the a-book. An a-book is an intelligent and improved e-book that characterises the students through tests and observations, and then customises the content of the textbook to help them learn better. I.e., an a-book adapts to the reader.