Towards a web-based adaptive problem-based learning application

Abstract

Problem-based learning (PBL) can be organized and conducted in a number of ways. Building a PBL application to support various PBL forms directly is difficult because the scope of variability cannot be completely known and there is a high cost in terms of time and efforts incurred. Existing PBL applications are developed usually to support a specific form of PBL. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach (MDA) to the development of an adaptive PBL application. We apply model-driven principles to enable the teacher to represent a PBL script in a PBL scripting language as a formal model and then use the model at run-time for managing the executions of the adaptation at a high level. As a consequence, the functions and the user interfaces of the PBL application can be adjusted according to the role of the users, the phases and the activities of a PBL process. The users of the PBL application, especially those who have no comprehensive knowledge about PBL, can be guided and constrained to do right thing at right time following a well-known PBL model or a best practice.