Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The global eLearning industry is predicted to grow to $107.3 billion by 2015, and a large part of its success is due to the adoption of intelligent tutoring and learning systems that adapt and personalize information based on the specific profile, behavior, and intentions of learners. This project will contribute to the growing eLearning sector by providing industrial partners SoJo Ventures and PetaCube with the R&D support they need to build intelligent platforms that deliver this educational content. The outcomes of this project will be implemented as a standalone, open source software platform enabling learners to navigate content in a customized and tailored form.Currently, the systems used by these industrial partners provide only basic adaptation of content based on simple keyword searches or prior content browsing history. However, given their growing client bases, these companies require an intelligent content adaptation framework that is able to understand users needs, their background knowledge, their preferences, and also the specific type of training that they require. This framework would allow the system to select the most appropriate content from its content base and adapt its presentation sequence and style. The project will focus on building an adaptive learning system that semantically annotates educational content and knowledge. Using Semantic Web technologies, the system will make intelligent adaptation decisions for each individual user. The project will accomplish this using the following methodology. First, it will build a content maintenance framework that semantically classifies educational content based on its relevance. Second, it will develop dynamic user models that are semantically interrelated to educational content and prior user knowledge. Third, it will propose and implement content recommendation algorithms that estimate the interest of a user in a subject and provide suggestions on how content should be offered to users. Finally, it will use interaction design principles to ensure that the presentation of content suits users' needs.