A NEW ADAPTIVE E-LEARNING CONCEPT FOR MULTIDISCIPLINARY LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Engineering is a broad multidisciplinary discipline, also reflected in the increase of the variety of students in a single academic course in terms of foreknowledge and of interests and skills. Adaptive learning is a powerful tool to achieve tailored education in a multidisciplinary learning environment. Students with a diverse background and even with different levels can work together in a similar learning environment. Without the support of e-learning concepts and online tools, this method is however very time consuming and ineffective for the lecturer. E-learning modules are typically passive, not directly guiding the students. The new concept presented here, actively helps the student to develop their own learning route, based on their needs and interest, yet meeting the course's learning objectives. The overall concept is based on a plenary core set of lectures embedded in a flexible shell of adaptive e-learning modules. These modules are cross-linked allowing the student to step from one topic branch to another, depending on the need or interest identified by a brief end-of-module assessment and earlier information collected by the system. A basic version of the web-based application to guide students through the network of elearning modules is tested and showed positive results in terms of student appreciation yet not directly in terms of performance. The latter is the most relevant from a didactic point of view, while the success of the concept heavily relies on positive student appreciation. The outcome of these first test used as input for the development of the final application.