PERFORMA – ARCO-CNR

Type of project: Regional  |  Start date: 11/12/2017  |  End date: 10/12/2019

The concept of personalized learning, which appears for the first time in the USA at the beginning of the 80s of the 20^th century, presents itself in the international pedagogical landscape as a bet with a high potential in the educational sector.

This new concept of learning takes the form of an implementation of training courses designed to articulate themselves around the needs, interests and attitudes of individual learners.

This theme is the subject of study and research in various parts of the world and is imposing itself as a dominant theme also within the educational policies of various countries, including Italy.

In this regard, the national indications for the curriculum of the kindergarten and the school of the first education cycle of 2013 are significant, where an explicit reference is made to the centrality of the person in the learning process and the school is given the purpose of “achieving training courses more and more responding to the personal inclinations of students, in the perspective of enhancing the distinctive aspects of each person’s personality”.

In this scenario, digital technologies can offer a great contribution to the personalization of the didactic action, allowing the development of new teaching strategies and learning methodologies exploiting the potential of the so-called “mobile learning”, “blended learning”, Web 2.0 etc.

Within the context outlined above, the project aims at defining new methodologies based on the use of language technologies for the creation of distance training paths customizable at different levels.

The result will be the development of a system for profiling didactic materials usable within e-learning platforms able to evaluate their adequacy with respect to the linguistic skills of the students and with respect to the reading device (tablet, pc, smartphone) from which a course can be followed.

For each of the two dimensions, the degree of adequacy of the materials will be assessed from the point of view of both the linguistic complexity of the study texts and the proposed contents.

The objectives of the project will be the definition and adaptation of new algorithms based on natural language processing tools for the evaluation of the complexity of the text and the contents proposed in the courses with respect to the skills of the users who will take advantage of the courses and to the methods of use offered by the different usable devices.