Tommy Kubica

Adaptable Collaborative Learning Environments

Audience Response Systems (ARSs) provide a promising opportunity to address issues occurring in traditional higher education, e.g., the lack of interaction, by allowing students to participate anonymously in lectures using their mobile devices.

However, the introduction of such systems leads to its own challenges: The lecturer has to adjust his/her preferred teaching strategy to the chosen system, as this usually relies on a single supported didactic concept and therefore has a limited, fixed functional scope. Moreover, the lecturer has to select and use the system’s functionality and interpret the received data by himself – support or recommendations of a suitable functional scope are rarely provided. Another issue becomes obvious by investigating different didactic concepts: While collaboration with subsequent group discussions is an integral part of various concepts, it is rarely or not at all supported by ARSs. Using the means of adaptation, we target to overcome these limitations.

The following research question arises: How can different levels of adaptation support the lecturer in using learning environments in a proper way? To answer this question, three sub-questions will be investigated: How will adaptation in modeling support the lecturer in creating customized scenarios? How will adaptation at runtime support the lecturer by providing collaborative functional proposals? What are the trade-offs of using the concept of roles instead of object orientation?