Semantic Rule-based Approach for Supporting Personalised Adaptive E-Learning

Instructional designers are under increasing pressure to enhance the pedagogical quality
and technical richness of their learning content offerings, while the task of authoring for
such complex educational frameworks is expensive and time consuming. Personalisation
and reusability of learning contents are two main factors which can be used to enhance the
pedagogical impact of e-learning experiences while also optimising resources, such as the
overall cost and time of designing materials for different e-learning systems.
However, personalisation services require continuous fine tuning for the different features
that should be used, and e-learning systems need sufficient flexibility to offer these
continuously required changes.
The semantic modelling of adaptable learning components can highly influence the personalisation
of the learning experience and enables the reusability, adaptability and maintainability
of these components. Through the discrete modelling of these components, the
flexibility and extensibility of e-learning systems will be improved as learning contents
can be separated from the adaptation logic which results in the learning content being no
longer specific to any given adaptation rule, or instructional plan.
This thesis proposes an innovative semantic rule-based approach to dynamically generate
personalised learning content utilising reusable pieces of learning content. It describes an
ontology-based engine that composes, at runtime, adapted learning experiences according
to learner’s interaction with the system and learner’s characteristics. Additionally, enriching
ontologies with semantic rules increases the reasoning power and helps to represent
adaptation decisions. This novel approach aims to improve flexibility, extensibility and
reusability of systems, while offering a pedagogically effective and satisfactory learning
experience for learners. This thesis offers the theoretical models, design and implementation
of an adaptive e-learning system in accordance with this approach. It also describes
the evaluation of developed personalised adaptive e-learning system (Rule-PAdel) from
pedagogical and technical perspectives.