Using Learning Styles for Creating and Personalizing Educational Content in Ubiquitous Learning Environments

Abstract

The fact that people behave and learn in a different pace requires individual differences to be properly considered in the teaching/learning process. Among several cognitive theories that could be used for this purpose, a promising one is to explore the use of students' learning styles (LSs), with several research studies indicating that their use has positive impacts on learning outcomes. At the same time, Ubiquitous Learning Environments (ULEs) have the potential to make the multimedia authoring of Learning Objects (LOs) an automated process, resulting on even larger educational content repositories and increasing the need for more adequate presentation strategies to students. This article presents an approach for creating and personalizing LOs through a probabilistic proposal of the Felder and Silverman Learning Styles Model. A prototype of the proposed model was integrated into a ubiquitous educational platform and experimented in real settings. Results indicate the existence of correlations between different types of interactions carried out by students and their respective LSs.