Session F2E 0-7803-7444-4/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE November 6 - 9, 2002, Boston, MA 32 nd ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F2E-2 THE 3DE CUSTOM COURSE COMPILER: AN ENGINE TO ASSEMBLE CUSTOM WEB COURSES Dante Del Corso 1 , Emanuela Ovcin 2 , Gaetano Morrone 3 and Dimitri Gianesini 4 1 Dante Del Corso, Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy, delcorso@polito.it 2 Emanuela Ovcin, COREP, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy, ovcin@polito.it 3 Gaetano Morrone, COREP, morrone@lamp.polito.it,, 4 Dimitri Gianesini, COREP, gianesini@lamp.polito.it Work partially supported by European Community under the Information Society Technology (IST) RTD programme, contract IST-1999-10697. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this paper. It does not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein. Abstract  The educational results of web courses can be improved through the development of modules customized for the requirements and needs of each learner. This task becomes feasible only if automated tools for course compila- tion are available; such tools are developed in the 3DE project. The core of the 3DE system is the Custom Course Compiler: it assembles micromodules in courses, taking into account the learning style and other parameters of each student. By using a library of micromodules worked out specifically for different learning styles, the Custom Course Compiler is able to assemble different versions of a course, customized for each learner. The paper describes the design, the development, and the structure of the Course Compiler, the connection with the micromodule database, and the underlying pedagogical organization. The operation of the compiler is based on metadata used to classify content and pedagogical parameters of learning units. The design envi- ronment includes tools to facilitate the cooperation among several authors, working on similar contents but with differ- ent teaching styles, the reuse of existing material, and the verification of the prerequisite-contents chain. Index Terms  author interface, course customization, learning styles, web courses. INTRODUCTION Interactive Multimedia educational material is usually de- signed to fit the needs of large groups of learners. Personal needs cannot be taken into account, and this reduces the efficiency of these supports. The new challenge is to take care of the diversity of the learners – their competencies, knowledge, and attitudes. As students do learn in different ways, also instructors do teach with different methods, and develop different support materials. The matching is not affordable with standard “hand assembly” of courses, which involves direct creation and organization of contents by the author, but becomes feasible if an automated tool for course compilation is available. This is the approach of 3DE (De- sign, Development and Delivery - Electronic Environment for Educational Multimedia) [1], a research project within the European Union IST Vth Framework Programme [2] with the goal to develop methodologies and tools to build courses customized for the needs of each learner. 3DE ac- tivities are carried out by a consortium of 4 partners: COREP (co-ordinator, Italy), ARDEMI (France), STI (Spain), Polytechnic of Vaasa (Finland). The basic pedagogical principle of 3DE is to change the teacher-learner relations from the 1-to-N paradigm (one teacher for many learners, as in standard classrooms) to a N- to-1 model: each learner can select among several available teachers the one who best suits his/her learning style. The 3DE environment include tools to analyze learning style preferences, competence, and educational goals in terms of final competence and skills, and to classify the units pro- duced by different authors with coherent teaching style pa- rameters. A key decision in the 3DE pedagogical design has been the selection of the learning style model and the related learning style test, based on the constructive theory elaborated by Kolb and secondly by Honey & Mumford’s: learning style parameters are used in the 3DE learning style profiling to classify both learners and content. Selected learning styles are Activist, Pragmatist, Reflector, Theorist [3],[4]. In 3DE, courses are compiled from a library of micro- modules, taking into account the specification of final educa- tional/training goals and the results of learner’s competence/ preference analysis. In this way it is possible to build several different custom packages from the same pool of micro- modules. The Custom Course Compiler is the core of the 3DE sys- tem: it assembles micromodules in courses, taking into ac- count the personal learning style, the final learning goals, the previous knowledge and the preferences of the user, and can therefore build different versions of a course, one for each learner. The automated construction and the reuse of con- tents cut the development time of high-quality interactive multimedia educational packages, while the learner-centered customization cuts the time required to learn, thus improving the global effectiveness of teaching and training packages, and reducing the life cycle cost. This approach is applied for the first time to pedagogical and educational products.