ImREAL – Immersive Reflective Experience-based Adaptive Learning
The popularity of immersive simulated environments for experiential learning is growing; they will be a key part of tomorrow’s technologies in the area of adult training. The major challenge is to effectively align the learning experience in the virtual environment with the ‘real-world’ context and ‘day-to-day’ job practice. ImREAL’s goal is to develop a novel conceptual framework and innovative semantic-enhanced intelligent services to extend existing simulated environments with adaptive meta-cognitive scaffolding in a cost-effective way.
The corresponding objectives are:
- Reality modelling: develop a methodology and innovative services to model ‘real-world’ activities and capture semantically-enhanced collective content of job-related experiences;
- Alignment between reality and simulated environment: develop novel services to derive an extended model of the simulated situation context and a model of the learner;
- Meta-cognitive scaffolding: develop a pedagogically-driven technological solution to generate adaptive affective meta-cognitive activities in simulated environments;
- Tuning: provide a flexible way to tune the augmentation services by using feedback from learners, trainers, and tutors;
- Integration: develop an integrated architecture of services for augmented simulated experiential learning, and implement robust demonstrators to improve existing simulated experiential learning environments;
- Evaluation: evaluate how augmented simulated experiential learning affects learning efficacy in the representative domain;
- Readiness for the market: assess how ready the innovative approach is for commercialisation and deployment in practice.
ImREAL will provide a new class of cost-effective adaptive systems adjusted to the adult learners' needs:
- pioneering a new psychologically and instructionally sound technological approach to seamlessly link the simulated learning experience and ‘real-world’ job-related experiences;
- developing a novel conceptual framework - augmented simulated experiential learning - where innovative adaptive services extend virtual environments by making a connection with the ‘real-world’; and,
- delivering a new open framework of intelligent services which can be plugged into virtual environments to enhance self-regulated learning.
The ImREAL framework exploits and significantly extends advances in distributed architectures, context modelling, dialogic systems, semantic web, and ontological reasoning, and follows pedagogical models of adult self-regulated learning to deliver:
- an evolving model of ‘real-world’ job activities, linked to storytelling and semantic content augmentation;
- an extended model of the learner and context, aligning experiences in the simulated environment and the ‘real-world’; and,
- affective meta-cognitive scaffolding to motivate and engage learners and promote self-reflection, self-evaluation and self-awareness.
User trials will examine how ImREAL improves the learners’ and trainers’ experiences. Specifically, learners can improve their interpersonal skills and abilities in order to set learning strategies and goals, while trainers can become aware of ‘real-world’ job practice and training needs.
The ImREAL project is supported by the European Commission, in the theme ICT-2009 Digital Libraries and Technology Enhanced Learning, as a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP), under the 7th Framework Programme, Grant agreement No: ICT-257831.
Consortium
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom (coordinator)
- Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- Graz University of Technology, Austria
- University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
- Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
- Imaginary Srl, Italy
- EmpowerTheUser Ltd, Ireland
Contribution of the Knowledge Management Institute, Graz University of Technology:
The main contribution from the Knowledge Management Institute at the Graz University of Technology to the ImREAL project is in the field of evaluation. The Graz team leads the specification of a scientifically sound evaluation methodology. This methodology will be concentrated on the effects and impact which ImREAL has on the learner and on his or her learning. The evaluation methodology will be applied in user trials, which will serve the validation of the conceptual framework and the examination of the psycho-pedagogical value of the new technological solutions. Furthermore, the Graz team is involved in the work on the psycho-pedagogical foundations of ImREAL and contributes to the elaboration of requirements for adult self-regulated learning and the design of meta-cognitive scaffolding.
The ImREAL team in Graz (in alphabetical order):
- Dietrich Albert
- Marcel Berthold
- Christina Eder
- Cord Hockemeyer
- Tobias Ley
- Christina Steiner