Supporting Teachers to Retrieve and Select Learning Objects for Personalized Courses in the Moodle_LS Environment Carla Limongelli, Alfonso Miola Dept. of Computer Science and Automation Roma Tre University Rome, Italy {limongel, miola}@dia.uniroma3.it Filippo Sciarrone, Marco Temperini Dept. of Computer and System Science Sapienza University Rome, Italy {sciarro@dia.uniroma3.it, marte@dis.uniroma1.it} Abstract — In this paper we present a comprehensive framework supporting the tasks of defining, retrieving, and importing Learning Objects (LOs) for personalized courses. It is partially implemented in a Moodle-based personalization system, where the instructional designer is guided through: 1) a theoretical specification of the needed LOs; 2) a retrieval function of actual LOs, by automatically querying standard- compliant repositories; 3) an analysis of such items, to import those selected by him, also adding metadata relevant to the personalization system, at hand. This work overcomes some well known shortcomings of the Moodle system in supporting retrieval of learning material in a personalization context. Keywords - Learning; Systems, Environments and Architectures; Adaptive, Personalized and Context-Aware Technology-enhanced Learning & Education I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, the request for distance learning is surging, thanks to the new internet-based technologies: open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs), such as Moodle 1 or ATutor 2 , and Web-based Educational Systems (WES), either generic (such as LecompS [7]) or AI-based (such as BLITS [9] or HyperCase [10]) empower instructional designer and learner with convenient and augmented instructional opportunities, and support an increasing demand for them. At the same time, the development and application of standards for e-learning is originating a wide availability of Learning Objects Repositories (LORs) on the internet, such as MERLOT, CNX and WISC-ONLINE, providing a growing portfolio of structured learning material. Moreover, the process of building a new course is a critical and hard task to accomplish in any case: setting the right learning goals on a particular domain, building a new concept map, building or re-adapting old LOs and delivering the course in a suitable LMS. Consequently, one standing problem in the area of web-based e-learning is how to support instructional designers capability to retrieve and select effectively and efficiently learning materials, appropriate for their educational purposes, by also speeding up the overall course building process considerably, from the concept map building to the LOs delivery (see [2], [1] and [5] for an overview on this topic). Here we present a 1 http://www.moodle.org 2 http://atutor.ca module to support instructional designers to build new courses by speeding up the process of retrieving new didactic material, i.e., LOs from LORs, in order to use, share and re-use them for personalized courses as well. This module acts as a functional interface to LORs, running in the Moodle_LS LMS, an enhanced version of the standard Moodle LMS [8]. The added value of our approach to the LO retrieval problem is threefold. First our module is embedded in the Moodle_LS environment: one doesn’t need to exit from the didactic environment to retrieve LOs, surfing through different LORs, each of them having different rules for retrieval. Second, our module allows selecting and tagging those LOs that were found suitable for the personalized course by the instructional designer. Third, the actual management of a LOR, derived by the retrieval activities, in the LMS itself: teachers can search for and share SCOs with others who had entered them in the system, or simply reuse those already imported for another course or module. A focal point of our work is that the instructional designer is supported in real time: the learning material can be retrieved and added to the new course while building each LO. Besides, all the selected learning material will be stored in a local data warehouse, ready to be locally shared with other instructional designers. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 shows some related work; Section 3 reports on the functional architecture of the system. In Section 4 a session of use of the proposed module is shown; then conclusions are drawn. II. SEARCHING LOS FROM LORS: SYSTEMS AND METHODS In the last years, due to the pace of growth of distance education, a lot of LORs have been posted in the Internet by public and private institutions in order to share didactic material among private and public instruction communities. Also, many approaches and standards are being proposed to overcome the interoperability problem: each LOR presents a particular way of storing LOs, making it difficult interoperability and exchange of teaching materials between different actors who would like to use it to speed up the preparation of new courses. This need becomes harder if the course should be a personalized one, where different versions of LOs are needed, taking into account student learning styles, as in the Moodle_LS system [8]. Our proposal aims to provide teachers with a homogeneous C. Limongelli, A. Miola, F. Sciarrone and M. Temperini, "Supporting Teachers to Retrieve and Select Learning Objects for Personalized Courses in the Moodle_LS Environment," 2012 IEEE 12th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Rome, Italy, 2012, pp. 518-520, doi: 10.1109/ICALT.2012.110.