This presentation outlines work done by Enovation and research partners in the Percolate project to investigate allowing for personalised JIT help in Moodle.

1. Towards Context-specific Personalised
Help in Moodle
Michael O’Mahony - Clarity Centre, UCD
Mark Melia – Enovation Solutions

2. Context – Percolate Project
• e-Learning Industry working with academic
researchers
• Industry defined challenging use cases
• Challenge is to apply research to use case
• Third level use case – helping students with
problems
Industry Academia

3. The Problem
• Students working online needs help
• Finding wood from trees difficult on WWW
• I need help with X now!
– Understand subject
– Pedagogically sound
– Personalised to me
photo by London College of Fashion

4. The Problem
• NDLR (DSpace) Moodle search
• One size fits all
• Celebrate individuality
– Prior knowledge
– Type of resources
– Course context

5. Recommender system
• Hooks Moodle into a learning resource
repository
• Search understands what peers found useful
• Search understands the conceptual structure
of subject
• Uses conceptual structure to understand
learners needs
• Results organised according to a pedagogical
strategy

6. Software Testing

8. How does it work?
• Semantic search
– Based on conceptual structure of subject area
• Social search
– Based on whether “similar” learners found a
resource useful
• Composition engine
– Compose resources from search into learning
episode

9. User Trial
DCU Trial
• 18 DCU 4th year Mechanical Engineering students
• 6 week trial (complete)
• Students used application in the context of the
following assignment:
“You are a process engineer for a multi-international
institution that wishes to introduce an advanced
manufacturing technology for one of their new advanced
material based products…”

10. User Trial
DCU Trial
• 527 completed search sessions
• 419 results selected (130 distinct results)
• User feedback:
– 36 results rated or tagged
– 34 post-confidence scores for concepts
“A wider range of information needs to be
“Good system, still in its early uploaded in order for it to accomodate
stages” [Student A] the academic objectives of the materials
module” [Student B]

11. Next Steps
• Percolate  LTC
• Better UI
• Manual effort
• Non-intrusive methods of gaining info

12. Questions?
Acknowledgements:
Dr. Dermot Brabazon – DCU
Catherine Bruen – NDLR
We kindly acknowledge Enterprise Ireland for their
support for this project.
Contact: mark.melia@enovation.ie
Contact: mark.melia@enovation.ie