Auto-Generative Learning Objects for Middle School Arithmetic

• Published in: eLearning and Software for Education 2018, Vol.14 (4), p.311-318
• Main Authors: Costea, Felicia-Mirabela, Chirilă, Ciprian-Bogdan, Creţu, Vladimir
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Education; Social Sciences
• ISSN: 2066-026X; 2066-8821

Nowadays middle school students tend to use more and more gadgets like tablets, smart phones and laptops. Learning materials tend to become electronic having automatic evaluation mechanisms like quizzes, tests, etc. The learning materials usually have static content. Even LMS supported evaluations implemented by quizzes have static questions and answers and the only solution to create diversity for the student is to shuffle the order or both questions and answers. In this context there is a high interest in the topic of reusable learning designs in order to create dynamic content. These offer the prospect of capturing effective designs for learning and making them available for reuse and adaptation. The idea of capturing successful learning designs and making these the basis for reuse, rather than content, is at the core of the concept of generative learning objects or GLOs. AGLOs are automatically instantiate GLOs based on a meta-model expressed in XML, domain JavaScript object libraries and a generation environment implemented in JavaScript. The reuse of AGLO requires limited or no programming skills at all. In this paper we propose a set of AGLOs dealing with middle school arithmetic: transformations, additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions of rational numbers as fractions. The tutors can change the presentation, can adapt the existing design to their own needs, or can write new functions and objects to extend the domain library. The prototype is implemented as a JavaScript application running on Apache web server connected to a MySQL database. The approach was tested online with the fifth-grade middle school students.