European researchers participating in the European Learning Grid Infrastructure (ELeGI) project recently completed an online learning platform that automatically responds to individual students’ learning styles as well as teacher input. The ELeGI promises to revolutionize online pedagogy by rendering the online learning platform fluid: instead of adapting to the platform, teachers have the platform adapt to them.

 

This development is of course hardly surprising—in our July 24 post about Blackboard’s partnership with Sakai we mentioned that open source platforms at least allow students and professors to modify the learning environment. ELeGI takes this observation a step further by automating the process of modification either through teacher inputs or its own artificial intelligence. When students struggle, the platform provides them with remedial mini-courses that adapt to students’ inputted preferences.

 

By promising to make the online learning experience more dynamic, the ELeGI platform has the potential to drastically improve elearning environments. Nonetheless, without actually implementing it in online programs and receiving feedback from teachers and instructors, this promise is purely hypothetical. Until then, we will maintain optimistically skeptical.

Further reading:

ELeGI Official Site

Giving Learning a Personal Touch

Tags: Learning Technologies, Online Education