AIED 2009 - Workshop Enabling creative learning design: how HCI, User Modelling and Human Factors help in 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education

A Workshop held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education
July 6th - 10th 2009, Thistle Hotel, Brighton, UK
http://www.aied2009.com


Background and Motivation
---------------------------------------
Although the term ¡°Learning Design¡± (LD) has been in use only in recent
years, the earliest work in the field can be traced back to
¡°instructivist¡± approaches, which provided a clear instructional
sequence for teachers to follow. The recognition of the need to make
theoretical findings readily available to practitioners led to extensive
work on Instructional Design Theory, which attempted to make learning
theories more operational. However, the later focus on ¡°constructivist¡±
theories of learning presented more of a challenge to an operational
approach. The development of interest in ¡°Learning Design¡± as a focus of
research began with the realisation that the constructivist pedagogical
theories did not easily transfer to the practice of teaching. The
emphasis on what learners were doing, and how to support their
activities, was much less constrained by constructivism. This dependence
on the context in which learning takes place required an approach to
teaching based on design principles rather than pre-defined
instructional sequences.

There have been attempts to offer ¡°toolkits¡± or software to enable ease
of entry into pedagogic design and support non-specialists in engaging
with learning theories. Despite the effort, existing e-learning systems
and authoring tools have several limitations in respect of support
provided and usability, and cannot accommodate the needs of teachers who
increasingly look for more intelligent services and support when
designing instruction in order to avoid disorientation and develop a
holistic understanding of how all the information fits together.
Providing support by incorporating personalisation technologies into
teachers¡¯ designs could be potentially helpful in formulating teaching
goals and lesson plans and in better accommodating learners¡¯ needs. In
fact, at present, systems do not provide tools for identifying patterns
in effective learning design practice and offer no opportunities for
teachers to personalise the learning experience and collaborate with
peers in developing more effective designs. It also appears to be a
large communication gap between authoring tools and learning systems,
and teachers/learning designers. For example, teachers want to work with
the terminology they are familiar with for describing their teaching and
learning, which of course can create a problem for the exchange of
learning designs using existing systems. Thus, the challenge for the
next generation of Learning Design tools is thus to put the designer
requirements and experiences at the centre of tool development. To this
end, the Workshop will draw to the vast experience of HCI and user
modeling and human factors research.

Learning design is a creative process and tools are prescriptive and
constraining and are often seen more as a hindrance. Thus, it is widely
acknowledged that we need to do more to bridge the education/computer
science divide and create a genuinely interdisciplinary basis for
representing learning design, if we are to succeed in persuading
teachers to work with this approach as the technical complexities
involved are often not perceived by teachers as relevant to their needs.
Moreover, it is important to offer teachers intelligent services, such
as personalisation and content adaptation, matching learners'
characteristics with specific learning designs, and exploiting
teachers-directed feedback about the usefulness and appropriateness of
learning objects or designs for certain learning scenarios. In this
vein, the Workshop considers personalisation in the context of learning
design as an important feature of the next generation of LD tools. This
could be achieved by capturing the needs of each individual teacher or
group of teachers and providing support for reaching a goal that
efficiently and knowledgeably addresses individual or group needs.
However, personalisation would not be achieved by prescribed sequences
of actions and information but by creating a dynamic structure, e.g.
based on ontologies, and more generally using user and community data so
that the Learning Design tools can adapt to the users¡¯ knowledge,
profiles and needs, and that users can consciously adapt the system to
suit their articulated preferences. The Workshop will attempt to address
the challenges discussed above. Furthermore, it aims to explore what
teacher/learning designers-related information should be captured and
how, and what kind of adaptations are needed to support teachers¡¯
individual needs, goals and interests. It will also look at how users'
interactions with designs and annotations of designs and the use of
concepts from controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies can be
captured in a user-friendly way and used to support the Learning Design
process.

The Workshop Content and Themes
-----------------------------------------------
Technology enhanced learning, to be fully effective, requires a
synthesis of insights from the learning sciences and Computer Science,
in particular AI. Broadly speaking, the learning sciences provide deep
insights into the learning design domain, while computing and
particularly AI-based approaches provide formal representations,
reasoning mechanisms and data structures that enable those insights to
be captured in a precise and computationally executable form. There is a
double challenge here, which is at the heart of a successful synthesis.

This half-day Workshop aims to bring together education, HCI and AI
experts to discuss and share ideas about the 21st century view on
learning design, curriculum and AI-based technology to support the
content design, creation, sharing, re-use, modification and learning
that may occur when teaching. Contributions will include theoretical and
applied research, and preliminary results on the following themes:

• Creative Interfaces for creative Learning Design: Needs of the user
and communities, barriers of use, usability and support through
intelligent interfaces. How can research in HCI and intelligent user
interfaces be used to facilitate the process of Learning Design? How can
interaction analysis be used to improve Learning Design?
• Human factor drivers for personalising the Learning Design experience:
Personalisation, re-use, sharing designs from theory to practice to
community. What are the human factors that influence the process of
Learning Design? What community concepts can be exploited to enable
creative Learning Design? What can AI do to capture and represent human
factor considerations, patterns of behaviour and community knowledge for
Learning Design? What AI-based knowledge representation and inference
mechanisms are needed in personalised Learning Design tools? Can these
AI-based mechanisms help to overcome the cognitive demands when using
these tools?

Workshop Topics
---------------------------
Full and short papers that address one or more of the following topics
are welcome

• User experiences when designing a course using existing tools and
identification of their limitations;
• Context-aware design to support Learning Design;
• Context-awareness as a design approach to aid building e-learning
design tools; Can next generation AI reduce cognitive overload to
enhance the usability?
• User-centred design models for Learning Designs (user models,
preferences, usage models, personalisation);
• Human factors experience from the ¡°Learner Designer perspective¡±, e.g.
users approach to design, users tool preferences, priorities, re-use of
designs;
• HCI design to overcome barriers of use;
• Recommendation systems and personalisation for Learning Design:
designing rule of thumb or heuristics, inference on ontological models,
inference theory and architecture, nearest neighbour for ¡°concept¡±
recommendation; Can they help with tool usage? How can pedagogical
approaches be used in Learning Design to personalise the learning
experience?
• Drawing from research and experience from other applications to see
how Education tools might benefit from AI.
• Community-based and collaborative approaches. Does a community or
collaborative approach ease the learning design task?
• Intelligent interfaces to aid the creative process of Learning Design;
• User modelling to assist Learning Design tools to enhance
personalisation features.

Submission Format and Procedure
--------------------------------------------
Full papers should not exceed 10 pages and short papers should be up to
5 pages. Authors should follow the same template that is used for the
main conference. All papers should be formatted according to IOS Press
guidelines (formatting instructions are available on the IOS Press
Authors Corner webpages at: www.iospress.nl/). Workshop papers will be
published in full length in the workshop proceedings and presented
orally at the Workshop. The papers will be printed locally for
dissemination at the AIED Workshops and kept as a PDF file resource on
the website. Please, submit your paper by e-mail to both Patricia
Charlton (patricia-AT-dcs.bbk.ac.uk) and Kyparisia Papanikolaou
(spap-AT-di.uoa.gr) by April 16, 2009. Portable Document Format (*.pdf) is
preferred.

Important Dates
-------------------------
April 16, 2009: submission of papers
May 20, 2009: notification of results
End of May 2009: delivery of camera-ready paper

Workshop Programme Committee
------------------------------------------------
Liliana Ardissono, University of Torino, Italy
Stefano Cerri, University of Montpellier II, France
Patricia Charlton, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Brock Craft, Institute of Education, UK
Ines Di Loreto, Dept of Informatics and Communication, University of
Milan, Italy
Maria Grigoriadou, University of Athens, Greece
Jelena Jovanovic, University of Belgrade, Serbia
Diana Laurillard, Institute of Education, UK
George Magoulas, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Alvaro Ortigosa, Universidad Aut¨®nonoma de Madrid. Spain
Kyparisia Papanikolaou, School of Pedagogical and Technological
Education, Athens, Greece
Barbara Schmidt-Belz, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information
Technology, Germany
Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer-Institut f¨?r Angewandte Informationstechnik
FIT,Germany

Workshop Organisation
----------------------------------
Patricia Charlton, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Maria Grigoriadou, University of Athens, Greece
Diana Laurillard, Institute of Education, UK
George Magoulas, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Kyparisia Papanikolaou, School of Pedagogical and Technological
Education, Athens, Greece

Contact Person
---------------------
For any questions regarding the Workshop, please email George Magoulas
(gmagoulas-AT-dcs.bbk.ac.uk)